Fireflies
Team: Riya Rao & Naomi Crowder worked jointly throughout every stage, from research through prototyping and testing.
Timeline: Apr 26, 2025 - Apr 27, 2025
Brief: This project was completed during the Mindshifts on Megafires Design-A-Thon. The theme was Communicating Complex Risks in a Changing Fire Landscape. Thanks to San Diego Gas & Electric, Wifire, the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD Basement, Blackstone Launchpad, and UCSD Design Lab for the opportunity. Our team won first place. All of the research, design, and prototyping below happened within a 48-hour period.
The Problem: How might we design more effective ways to communicate dynamic, evolving wildfire risks to the people who need to understand and respond to them, including residents, first responders, and elected officials, before, during, and after a wildfire event?
Design Challenge: Design a concept for communicating these risks. This could take many forms, from an app to a public information campaign to a real-time alert system.
Problem
Getting to the Problem: We started by mapping out possible audiences: residents, the elderly, and children. To narrow that down, we talked to four stakeholders, three from WiFire and one homeowner directly affected by the Palisades fires. A few themes came up again and again: a widespread lack of wildfire preparedness, the surprising role kids play as messengers within their households, and how much it matters for people to understand risk before disaster hits, not just during it.
That last theme is what pointed us toward children. We tested that direction with five elementary-aged kids, and the conversations confirmed it. Schools weren't really preparing them for wildfires, kids trusted parents, teachers, and officials as their main sources of information, and most of them had very little basic knowledge about fire at all. From there, we landed on our target audience: children in grades K-3 across California.
Problem Statement: How might we empower children in grades K-3 to understand, engage with, and remember wildfire preparedness, while also helping them spread that awareness within their own families?
Exploration
We mapped out potential solutions on an assumptions chart, weighing impact against how well each idea was backed by our research, then narrowed our shortlist down across three stages: in-school assemblies, at-home family games, and student-led community events. We landed on gamified learning, since research on childhood learning shows it boosts both engagement and retention for young audiences, and kids that age tend to be more curious and open to new information than adults.
What sealed it for us was thinking past the individual kid. Children act as a bridge into their households, bringing home what they learn and influencing how their families behave. Just as parents shape their kids, kids shape their parents right back, so teaching wildfire preparedness at this age has the potential to improve how entire families prepare
Solution
We built Fireflies, an interactive, gamified learning platform that teaches kids in grades K-3 about wildfire preparedness in a way that feels approachable rather than scary. The goal is to help kids feel capable of supporting their families in an emergency, while also giving them tools to process the fear and stress that come with it. Because kids bring what they learn home, the platform's impact reaches beyond the individual learner, making it useful both inside and outside the classroom.
User Testing
We first storyboard-tested the concept with Tolga Caglar, a computational data science researcher and father, before building anything.
He flagged that we'd need to think carefully about our audience's reading level, and suggested leaning more on visuals or audio.
He also saw real potential in the game format as something that would actually motivate kids to engage.
Next, we focused on testing preliminary interest rather than full game flow by creating a paper prototype and conducting interviews with 4 children and 5 adults.
All 4 kids were more drawn to a "mission" framing than a "map," which told us that language and framing matter a lot for engagement.
Younger kids (kindergarten-age) responded more to visual elements than older kids did.
All 4 kids wanted to keep playing after testing ended.
All 5 adults felt the game would be an effective way to teach their kids.
Next Steps
Winning first place earned us the chance to keep developing this concept through an internship with the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. We're continuing that work now as UX and Game Design Interns, interviewing wildfire experts and educators to figure out which concepts matter most to teach this age group, researching what makes gamified learning effective and accessible for diverse cognitive needs, and prototyping gameflow and interactions.