Discovering the Sustainable Development Goals with Polyup
By: Júlia Barrufet
Tags: Computational Thinking, Math, Edtech, Sustainable Development

The Polyup team is committed to creating a new generation of creative problem solvers through math and computer science. To accomplish this goal, we encourage students to create Poly Machines around the Sustainable Development Goals, so that they can learn how to approach these challenges in an analytical and mathematical way.

What are the Sustainable Development Goals?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) consist of 17 goals defined by the UN as a universal call to action for all countries and individuals to collaborate on ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring peace and equality for everyone all over the world. All the goals are interconnected, so it's necessary to have all of them in mind when trying to solve any one of them.

Creating the machine

Here are some guidelines that will help you create a good and complete machine on an SDG. (If you are new at authoring, you can also check this useful article on how to create good Poly Machines!).

Choosing the goal.

Before you start creating the machine, you have to decide what SDG you want to tackle, and do some research on it to give real data and practical solutions. A great resource for the SDGs is here. Naming the machine.

Make sure your machine has a clear and attracting name. It doesn't have to be the particular sustainable development goal’s title, but something that presents properly the content of your machine. The first chip: Introducing the goal

It's important for your first chip to give an introduction on the problem that you are going to confront, so this chip may give some facts and data for the player to understand the gravity of the problem. You can have an extra chip on introduction and meaningful data, but remember to keep the length of your machine between 3 and 7 chips! Proposing solutions

After introducing the goal you should have 2 or 3 chips where you suggest an impactful solution to contribute on achieving the goal. You can make all the chips on different aspects of the same solution, or propose different solutions for the chosen goal. Also remember to make the difficulty of the math in your chips grow as students progress in solving your machine! The conclusion

No matter the length of your machine, the last chip should give a conclusion to your investigation and proposal to help the player understand the impact of your solutions.

Learning impact for students

Creating machines on specific topics like the SDGs help students on various aspects.

Awareness of the SDGs. Students will get to know the purpose of the SDGs plan, the main goal of each, and the common threads that relate them. Research on the meaningful data of a certain SDG. Before creating a Poly Machine, students will have to look for significant information and meaningful data in order to make their Poly Machine as realistic as possible. This is a fun and bite-sized microcosm of the research process. Solutions proposal using the data found. Students will have to propose a set of math problems related with the chosen SDG, in which they suggest an impactful solution to contribute with the goal of the SDG. Measurable Impact of the solution. As the solution of the created problems is shown in numerical terms, its impact will be directly measurable. Two disruptive ways of learning:

- By teaching: When creating the machines, the students need to go a step forward and think of the best way to set up the problem so a future player can understand the machine and learn from it. This requires emotional maturity.

- By playing: When playing other’s machines students will also learn about a certain SDG in an entertaining way.

Now, it's time to use all these tips to create your own Poly Machine on one of the SDGs and show the Polyup community your ideas! To ignite some ideas, you can see some examples of machines we made here.