Little Mayor of ECOCITY

What it does

It is a STEAM educational toy for children aged 6 and above, which is based on the theme of ‘sustainable city building’. Through a modular puzzle system, children will play the role of ‘Little Mayor’ to build, manage and optimise the city.

Your inspiration

Global Sustainable Development Challenges: UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG11 and SDG16 clearly state - ‘Every child should understand the importance of clean water and sustainable urban systems’, Education Trends Shift Towards Interdisciplinary Integration STEAM Education Rapidly Spreading Across Education Systems Globally

How it works

This modular construction-management game progresses through three core phases. The ​​Basic Construction phase​​ unlocks residential, parks, and roads modules to establish fundamental urban frameworks, developing spatial design abilities, module identification, and environmental awareness. Players then advance to the ​​Resource Linkage phase​​, activating solar stations, water towers, and sewage plants to secure energy/water supply networks while exercising logic-chain construction, causality judgment, and operational coordination. The experience culminates in the ​​Management Operation phase​​ where control centers, LIC systems, and event cards enable optimization decisions under constraints like water allocation and housing density. Utilizing mobile devices, tablets, or gamepads, this final stage hones systematic thinking, resource integration, and strategic balance capabilities across all deployed modules.

Design process

I for my project for the preliminary research and offline interviews, most of the children think that my city splicing toys I want to not only be able to ‘build’ more able to “management” and parents think that the toys should be more challenging, rather than play a few times on the sense of challenge, the ‘sense of operation’ to join the natural best; combined with my above basic research and the three fault lines mentioned in my above introduction to start, combined with the current background to improve the development of creative ideas. The addition of the ‘sense of operation’ is naturally the best; combined with my basic research above and the three faults I mentioned in the introduction above, combined with the current background of the creative point of view to improve the dispersion.

How it is different

Through the puzzle + task + city simulation + STEAM integration of design ideas for children aged 6 years and above to provide a set of that can do, but also for the future of the city management-style educational toys programme and can use their brains, both close to life, and at the same time break the current stage of the educational toys are mostly focused on the ‘single subject enlightenment’, the lack of integrated system experience of the predicament! This provides a new programme

Future plans

Although this is just a conceptualised design, I hope I can bring some inspiration to others in my humble way to advance the educational design of children's toys, and I also hope that more people can see my design and work together to solve the technical problems, so let's try to land on this idea together!

Awards