School bus safety is important, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring! Four girls from the Minneapolis area are using their math and science skills to turn learning bus safety into a game which will make the process more fun for other students.
The students make up Team RUBIES, a Girls in Engineering, Math, and Science team of seventh and eighth graders from Lake Harriet Community School, and they worked together to make Bus Whiz, a simple computer game focused on teaching young students – between kindergarten and fourth grade – how to safely ride the bus to and from school.
The girls were inspired by a news story about a young girl who was killed after dropping her homework under the school bus and trying to retrieve it without letting the driver know, according to Isabella, a member of Team RUBIES.
“She got run over because she didn’t know that going under a school bus is wrong. And, there are a lot more stories like this, even of adults going under the bus to get dropped cell phones. Even adults … after all 13 years of school still don’t know how to act around a bus. Something needed to be done.”
The team spoke with many younger students in their school, asking basic questions such as, “What would you do if your bus got into an accident?” and were shocked to discover none of the students could answer the question.
“It was eye-opening,” Isabella said. “The teachers teach us this at the beginning of the year, but the [students] don’t remember it. We need to do something to make it stick so they remember and don’t get hurt.”
“Also, we found people didn’t remember what they were being taught because teachers would go over it for 30 seconds, so the kids didn’t really retain the necessary information,” Rachel, a seventh-grade team member, added.
“They don’t teach us that much about bus safety at any time and we all forget,” said Izzie, Team RUBIES member. “Even though we’re eighth graders, we feel without this project we wouldn’t have known what to do on a school bus if there was an accident.”
Using the textadventures.co.uk, a website which allows users to easily incorporate images and audio together, the team created four different characters for players to choose from. All the characters represent students who ride the bus, and each is presented with a select number of real-life situations that could arise on the bus and two options for how to properly respond.
When students select the wrong answers, they are given an explanation of why it’s wrong and given a chance to fix their answer.
Team RUBIES competed with their game in a FIRST Lego League Robotics competition and advanced to the Minnesota State Tournament on Feb. 7, placing in the top seven in the research project portion of the competition.
The girls are working to improve their game as well. They say they hope to make it more accessible to larger groups of people and will continue to use feedback to improve the experience. In the meantime, Team RUBIES is using search engine optimization techniques to make the game easier to find.
