Complementary studies - Sustainable card game presented in Bangkok
2025-09-26 Leuphana alumna Shontisha Yara Rücker presents the educational card game ‘So ein Müll’ (Such a rubbish) at the ‘National Science Fair’ in Bangkok as a successful transfer of knowledge. She developed the game as part of her complementary studies programme at Leuphana.
From the seminar room to an international trade fair - very few student projects have travelled such a steep path. Leuphana alumna Shontisha Yara Rücker and her fellow students have now succeeded in doing just that with their self-designed card game ‘So ein Müll’.
This is how it works: ‘The players are given playing cards with their own colour and various images of waste, for example an apple core,’ says Yara Rücker, explaining the rules of the game. There are seven large cards in the centre of the table with terms such as residual waste, organic waste, used glass and paper waste on them. In the next step, the players have to match the rubbish on their cards to the types of rubbish ‘the winner is the one who has no more cards left’. Action cards, ‘rubbish myths’ and a so-called quick sorting round would bring additional challenge and dynamism to the game, explains the former student.
The foundation for the card game is laid by the seminar ‘Communicating the challenges of sustainable development using gamification methods - interactive learning using the example of a mobile escape room’, a course on education for sustainable remembrance. This took place in the winter semester 2023/2024 as part of the complementary studies programme. ‘We were asked to work in groups to develop a concept for a game and then present it in a pitch format,’ explains Yara Rücker. She is a cultural studies major. She and her group developed a kind of murder mystery dinner and ‘So ein Müll’ (‘Such rubbish’) was the result of an idea from another working group. ‘I asked for permission to develop it further,’ reports Rücker. To customise the game, she added information texts to the back of the cards: ‘So that it doesn't just apply to Germany, but so that people also know how to use it in Thailand’. She is also responsible for printing the playing cards for the first time, so ‘So ein Müll’ is a real joint project.
The reason for this is an internship at the Goethe-Institut, which took her to Bangkok, Thailand, after completing her bachelor's degree in March 2025. ‘There is hardly any waste separation here,’ she says, describing her impressions. Nevertheless, she is interested in the topic. She clearly experiences this at the National Science Fair. A piece by Leuphana, ‘So ein Müll’, was recently presented to the international gaming world for the first time in the ‘German Pavilion’ at the fair.
The National Science Fair is an international trade fair for nature, technology and research in Bangkok, ‘one of the largest in Southeast Asia’, says Yara Rücker. The fair attracts around 300,000 visitors, mostly school classes.
The idea behind ‘So ein Müll’ is to playfully familiarise students with topics such as waste separation and global perspectives on waste avoidance. Seminar leader and lecturer at Leuphana Bastian Hagmaier describes the development of the project as a ‘great example of successful knowledge transfer from teaching’.
With her internship, Yara Rücker is also actively integrating ‘So ein Müll’ into the Goethe-Institut's education and workshop programme. ‘It's also great for learning vocabulary,’ she says, as the names of the different types of waste are written on the cards in both German and Thai. From now on, the institute will use it regularly for playful cultural education as part of their work.