The Knock Down the Weeds Game was a hit at the Farm Progress Show (FPS) this summer! The Illinois Soybean Association (ISA) Agronomy Team had the great idea for an educational, interactive, and FUN game for their plot area at FPS.

How did we make this come to life? It took a whole team of Ross Creative Works specialists, including elementary and high school students!

First, Associate Art Director Cecilia Feliciano and Graphic Designer Alison McKenney took the reins to come up with the design. When brainstorming how we would bring this project to life, we settled upon illustrations of the weeds instead of photos to make them more consistent and easy to understand for kids and families.

After many sketches, we decided upon an illustration style that was bold and bright and as simplified as possible since people would be seeing these from a few yards away. We wanted to highlight the unique qualities of each weed to educate the players on easy ways to identify common agricultural weeds.

Custom woodworking was the next big step, and Marisa Klass was just the person for the job. She is Katie Klaas’s daughter (age 16) and had just completed two semesters of Woodworking at Dundee-Crown High School. She used the sketch and desired dimensions from the design team to determine which supplies to buy. Then she got to work measuring, cutting, sanding, and screwing together the game structure.

No Knock Down the Weeds game would be complete without custom bean bags!

Jodi and her kids Gavin (age 10) and Genavive (age 8) had fun at the fabric store and found THE perfect outdoor fabric – two shades of green that look like soybean fields from above – what luck!

Jodi took this as an opportunity to introduce the kids to sewing and let them help create the bean bags. They helped with measuring and cutting the fabric, as well as sewing lines as straight(ish) as rows of soy!