Ava Rathenberg, Creator of the board game 'Travel Explore Discover,' joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how she came up with the idea for this informative and educational board game, and how she's using the proceeds to give back to her community.

Cheddar Innovates

This High School Innovator is Creating a Travel Board Game and Giving Back

Welcome back to Cheddar innovates, brought to you by curiosity stream on this show, we shine a spotlight on innovation across industries and our next guest is a young innovator that has created her own board game with education and travel at the forefront here joining us now is Eva Rothenberg, creator of the board game, travel, explore and discover Abra, can you just walk us through, you know how this game works and what's the objective of it? Yeah, of course, thank you so much for having me. Um so the main objective of the game is to travel around the world. So you start off by at a random location that you picked by drawing a card and then you drop three other locations from those three locations, you have to plan exactly how you're going to travel to each of those locations, starting from your starting location and then um by rolling a dice, you travel around the world. So once you reach one of your destinations on each card that you can read the description of the place and then you can ask one of the two questions that are on the card and these questions on these cards, they're pretty difficult. So um the main point of it is that the more that you play the game, the more that you learn about these different places and the more easily you can answer the questions, it's almost like traveling as you kind of go through different countries, you see kind of, or you learn a little bit about each country and now you're getting this access kind of essentially on a board game here, we understand that you got this idea for the game back when you were like in seventh grade, What sparked the idea initially? Yeah, of course, so um in seventh grade, I was really fortunate to have a family who loves to travel and was able to travel. Um so I was able to experience a lot of different places around the world and so some of the places that I've been to are actually on the board game, so um uh after uh after seeing my friends and seeing what they where they have been, um I found out actually that they don't know a lot about the places that they've been, or in general, places that they've been around the world. So, um I wanted to create something that's easy to play at home with your family and friends that you can learn about these different places and want to travel. It's very clear that that's kind of an opportunity, you know, for a lot of people, whether they're able to travel or not, they get to kind of almost be there in terms of understanding each country or learning something about about each country or city, um what went into the design and testing process of actually making the board games. Yeah, so um back when I started to have the idea, we actually bought a styrofoam board from Home Depot, um and we printed out a piece of sandpaper of a map and we drew all of the um, the places on the map by ourselves, I wrote the cards by myself. And so from that I was after playing with friends and family, I was able to understand what I needed to change about the game and what needed to improve on it. And so finally after um looking at um and getting all this input, I was able to reach out to a manufacturing company in Nevada and we were able to start working on an official prototype. So that actually took the longest, it took a couple of months of sending back and forth of Um new prototypes, looking at typos on, for example, the printing. And um after that, during that time of testing and prototyping, I was able to raise 12,000 over $12,000 on Kickstarter. Well speaking of the money that you have raised, we understand you donate essentially 100% of all the proceeds to charity. What are some of the ways the board game essentially then to further this, give back opportunity. Yeah, so 100% of our proceeds go to charity. And so when creating the board game, I had the intention of, since the travel game, um, and it's made for younger audience, um donating to international schools would be a priority. So, um while we were actually manufacturing the game, um, that was the time of the California forest fires were starting to break out. And so that actually caused a lot of Children to lose their homes um to lose their schools. So um after raising enough money um in 2019, I was able to donate $4500 to the red cross in California to help Children with the forest fires. Um After that, during covid um my uh instead started to focus on my school and getting back to my school since um and students there, So we were able to donate um over $1,500 to my school lunch program. And now this year um we've been able to donate $2,700 to student scholarships. I feel like such an underachiever in high school and in middle school, given you know what you're able to do, developing this, this game of course, starting in seventh grade. And we know you're what high school junior now I believe, um you know, good luck to you in your endeavors. I I imagine there might be more board games in the future and certainly more innovation for you. Congratulations Eva Rothenberg, creator of the board game travel, explore and discover what I might want to try and play