Frugal Education Action Cards: Built at the Speed of Need!

I recently blogged about my work creating a set of Frugal Education cards, designed to support educators in the application of frugal practices, and the cards are now being adopted into in-class activities at Universiti Malaysia, Sarawak (UNIMAS). The Creative Culture team at UNIMAS requested early access to the prototype cards and have printed out thirty sets to distribute to their Masters students in Learning Sciences. The students are beginning the process of designing learning activities to be applied in schools within rural communities across Borneo. How’s that for rapid prototyping?

Frugal Education card decks made by the Creative Culture team in Malaysia.
Frugal Education card decks made by the Creative Culture team in Malaysia. They made these before I had even completed the design files!

The team are currently working on translating the cards into Bahasa Melayu, and adapting the text to provide culturally-specific contexts. They’ve even created their own box art for them – shout out to Ismail for his amazing work!

The same is also taking place in Vietnam thanks to the D-Lab team who will be using the cards with teachers in their ACES case studies at Hua Binh College’s Nugyn Duch Tan school in the coming days. They intend to remix various cards into large posters to decorate the classrooms, keeping the frugal aspects front of mind during the design and delivery of educational activities.

I couldn’t be happier with this initial interest in the cards and I hope to gain some valuable feedback on their use, which I hope to use to inform a series of play mats to compliment the cards themselves. In the spirit of frugal education, the play mats will be co-created with educators, informed by their practice and experience, to develop a library of different use cases for the benefit of others. I look forward to seeing what the various teams come up with over time.

All language versions of the cards will be made available on this site, along with a library of play mats. All free of course! 🤙

In the meantime, I’m off to create a page to feature the cards, complete with downloadable design files and printable PDFs. I wasn’t expecting them to be used so soon, I haven’t even create the web page yet… 😅 Building at the speed of need in action!

Right I’m off, lots of work to do…

(Until there’s a page up: If you’re interested in creating a set for yourself / translating them into your own language, then ping me on Twitter)