Arwen Sadler

First-semester students at Olin College take a class called Design Nature, where one of the primary projects is to design a play experience for fourth graders inspired by the behavior of an animal. My team chose to make a game based on the “clumping” behavior of harvestmen (also known as daddy longlegs). Before settling on the clumping behavior, though, we researched other harvestmen behaviors, such as their unique walking movement, which allows them to walk functionally after losing legs, and ideated for play experiences involving those movements. We read research papers about harvestmen, researched the needs of our stakeholders, created a design goal and project timeline, and went through multiple design reviews.

For our final project, we made hundreds of yarn harvestmen with Velcro on the tips of their legs, constructed a fabric wall meant to mimic a cave or concrete building, and designed a game around putting the harvestmen up on the wall. We also added a component of the game where students would knock as many harvestmen off as they could using a fabric bat. We tested the game ourselves and with other classmates, and went through a final safety check and review with a professor before Play Day, when groups of real fourth-graders played our game and gave us feedback on it. Overall, we had a positive response, and I really enjoyed seeing kids have fun putting the harvestmen up and (especially) knocking them down.