Pupils from The Piggott School in Reading, England, have won the Design Museum's Design Ventura competition with a card game that encourages children to learn about colours in their surroundings.

The Colour Countdown game came out on top in the competition, which invites secondary school students aged 13 to 16 to develop a product that can be sold in the Design Museum's gift shop.

This year's brief, set by south London textile designer Kangan Arora, called for responses to the theme of colour and community, challenging students to consider "the importance of community practices, supporting and learning from one another".

The game devised by The Piggott School pupils is based on classic card games I Spy and Uno. It aims to encourage children to put down their devices and engage with the world around them to promote positive mental health.

The playing cards feature coloured cellophane windows that can be overlapped to create a blend of colours, which players then have to search out in their environment.

"You can play anywhere at all," explained the students in their pitch to a judging panel that included Arora and Dezeen's editorial director Max Fraser. "You draw cards of different colours – red, blue, orange, green etc. – and you have to look around and find objects in that colour."

The cellophane is made from wood pulp and the cards use FSC-certified paper to lower the product's environmental footprint.

Also included in this year's judging panel were the Design Museum's senior buying manager Preena Patel and Christoph Woermann, chief marketing officer for Deutsche Bank's Corporate Bank division.

"The winning design was chosen as it responded clearly to the brief in a way which was creative, fun and appealing to a range of audiences," said the judges. "We didn't want to put the product down and we knew that customers in the Design Museum would feel the same."

Launched in 2010 by the Design Museum in partnership with Deutsche Bank, the Design Ventura contest aims to reinforce the importance of early design education and fill gaps in the current design and technology curriculum.

The contest offers pupils at UK state secondary schools the chance to respond to a real-world brief, supporting the development of skills and experiences that help them understand how to bring ideas to life.

This year's winning project by The Piggott School will now be developed with a professional agency before being manufactured and sold in the Design Museum shop, with money raised from the sales going to a charity of the pupil's choosing.

Previous winners include a portable knife designed to prevent "avocado hand" – an increasingly common injury where people cut themselves while trying to de-stone an avocado.

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Brighton College student Pietro Pignatti has designed a compact avocado cutter that can be used to safely open avocados while on the go, .

Named Avogo, the cutter was designed by Pignatti as part of a school project to create a functional product that solves an everyday problem.

"The concept was born when I encountered the problem of not being able to have breakfast in the mornings when travelling to school," Pignatti told Dezeen.

"I would often take avocados on the train and felt uncomfortable bringing a knife on the train to cut open the avocado," he continued.

"This led me to develop a product that could cut and de-stone an avocado on the go while retaining the elements of practicality and style."

Designed as an alternative to a knife, the tempered steel tool has a small, curved blade that is hooked inwards to reduce the risk of injury.

"The most important part of the design was that it had to incorporate a hooked blade, curving towards the hand that you use to hold the Avogo. So if your hand slipped while cutting an avocado, it would be impossible to injure yourself," explained Pignatti.

"The hook eliminates avocado hand, an increasingly common injury where people cut themselves while trying to open an avocado."

Although other Avocado cutting tools exist, including the GoAvocado 3-in-1 tool released by kitchenware brand Joseph Joseph in 2018, Pignatti believes that the Avogo is unique due to the fact that it incorporates a metal blade and is extremely compact.

The tool is 7.5 centimetres long and 3.5 centimetres wide.

"Instead of being large and made with plastic like the well-know OXO avocado cutter, it is sleek and made by hand in Italy, with a focus on its design without giving up on its functionality," explained Pignatti.

"It is smaller than what is on the market. We have designed it to be portable, so the blade is hooked and falls under the maximum restriction on knives, allowing it to be transported on the go."

Pignatti entered the Avogo in the Design Museum's Design Ventura contest in 2017, where it won first prize in the Independent Schools category. Following this, he created 250 units and sold them on Kickstarter.

Now the Avogo is being manufactured by Italian knife maker Coltelleria Saladini – a family-run business that has been manufacturing knives since the 1800s in the small town of Scarperia in Mugello.

Coltelleria Saladini has manufactured 150 units of the Avogo and all revenues from their sale will be donated to Chilean charity Modatima. Based in the country's largest avocado-producing province, the charity campaigns for the ethical and sustainable cultivation of avocados.

Also aimed at improving knife safety, British cutlery brand Viners released a set with rounded tips in a bid to reduce knife crime. Other knives on Dezeen include the CK01 knife, which is made from a single piece of steel and was shortlisted in the homeware category of the Dezeen Awards 2019.

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