MacroCards  🃏 is a deck of 50 introductory flashcards to Entomology education with both tactile and digital ways of interaction and learning.

BOX DESIGNThe MacroCards Box
MacroCards comes with a box that utilizes our illustrations on the front while using the other sides to provide details on the assortment of cards, the type of information they can learn from them, and their educational purpose.

THE FULL DECK
52x Cards Total
The deck includes 50 introductory cards on the field of Entomology and key macroinvertebrates to know plus 2 extra cards: additional cover and closing card.

CARD DESIGN 1
5x Introductory Cards
There are 5 introductory cards that were created to support basic entomology understanding through what macroinvertebrates are, the concept of pollution tolerance values, different insect body parts, and the various functional feeding groups that exist.

CARD DESIGN 2
10x Order/Class Cards
There are 9 Order cards for the Insecta Class, and 1 card for the Non-Insect group, which consists of 4 Classes. These are to provide contextual information on the taxonomy hierarchy before jumping into the individual insects on the Family level.

CARDS DESIGN 3
36x Family Cards
There are 36 Family cards with our high resolution images on the front and our freshly made illustrations on the back. These are the main cards of the deck with QR codes that are paired directly with the PocketMacros app.

FLOW DIAGRAM
Physical & Digital Use Cases
For these cards, we designed them to be suitable for dynamic learning. As just cards, they walk novice users through the field of macroinvertebrates with fun illustrations and facts to keep them engaged. However, to extend the physical cards to digital and interactive ways of learning, we built these QR codes.

HOW IT WORKS

Quickly Jumping with a ScanQR codes are added to the Order and Family level cards to jump the users to our parent resources, the PocketMacros app (if already downloaded on the phone) or Macroinvertebrates.org. This extends the learning for a range of expertise as users can also accessible more detailed text and imagery information or the zoomable images, which are missing features on the physical cards.

RESEARCH
How are Other Learning Cards Designed?
When first building these cards, we looked into many existing example of scientific learning material that pair up text with image.
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Since we already designed flashcards for the mobile application, we thought that it would be an easy translation to physical cards. But through our exploration, we found a breadth of its own challenges when dealing with printed, physical mediums.

ITERATIONS

Making 104 Different Designs
‍Here are some our iterations over time. At the beginning, there was no systematic way of building these, which made the whole set feel quite overwhelming. After we settled down on a design system, we were card variations that still felt like they belonged with each other and spoke the same language.

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Building a System of ConsistencyThis is the word mark and design system for the MacroCards. A lot of similar typographical choices were taken from its parent resources.

ILLUSTRATIONsMaking Insects Cute ✨
A core aspect of these cards are the fun illustrations that humanizes the various macroinvertebrates that may initially seem intimidating to engage with. In the end, Karis and I drew 36 different illustrations for each macroinvertebrate to highlight their characteristic body parts as well as presenting them in a fun and playful manner.

LAUNCH DAYTesting with Real Users
For the launch day of the app at Stroud Water Research Center, we printed out 7 full prototype decks to user test with the diverse stakeholders that were attending the event.

We were able to get detailed feedback to revise before sending our cards to the printer for mass production, and teachers also had a participatory co-making session in which they imagined various games and activities these cards could be used for.

Now, the cards are in final editing phase before hundreds of them are produced to be sent to teachers, camp, and museums.