More than just study: Kuntoklubi


During last autumn and spring I was lucky enough to be involved in a client project for Nääsville ry working on the Kuntoklubi initiative. All in all the project brought together students from a number of degree programmes, resulted in a website, flash game and most importantly a whole series of workshops with disabled people in Tampere. This experience and time spent was far more beneficial than I had expected. Now is your chance to get involved as they are looking for people to continue the work!
Personally I embarked on this project hoping to learn about user experience and user interface design for disabled people. This I certainly did but along the way gained much valuable experience with Wordpress, game design and the last thing I was planning to do: project management!

Now with a website in place as well as game there's a need for a "weight watching" application and "exercise card" to further encourage a healthy lifestyle and diet. This was the main focus of the workshops we held which involved various sporting activities, drawing for the website, using the Internet and generally discussing what is healthy and what isn't. This pleasingly proved to be a topic that the disabled people were extremely enthusiastic about. Bringing up some very passionate discussions and opinions. This was certainly the most rewarding aspect of the project by being involved with such a great target audience - there really was never a dull moment!

Please get in contact with erja.kyllonen at naasville.fi to inform of your interest!

The project also involved a number of new elements to the Degree Programme in Media and the methods of doing projects. In the image you can see a new way to present project reports with a more visual poster. This was far better in my opinion for project feedback and discussion about things afterwards at least.

Likewise to do the game for Kuntoklubi I enrolled on the Game Design minor and got a great team together, with Angel Lopez and Johanna Lievemaa, to work on the game. The end result is called Super-Elli and gained good feedback for both the client and Kuntoklubi participants.

This game is certainly a long progression and not what I expected from waking up to an e-mail from Cai Melakoski on a dark autumn morning. Just a couple of weeks ago I presented the end results of Kuntoklubi in Finnish to the Neloskierre board who were both pleased with and greatfull for the results.
 
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