Project Desal: the iPad game that teaches kids how desalination works

Project Desal is a free iPad game in which the player builds a seawater desalination plant piece by piece. Monkeystack, an animation studio in Adelaide, South Australia, made it for SA Water, a business wholly owned by the Government of South Australia. The studio has produced interactive entertainment from 2004 and moved into educational games more recently, and the game draws on both sides of that work.

The plant in the game is modeled on the Adelaide Desalination Plant. SA Water built it for long-term water security, and it has delivered drinking water from 2011. In full operation it can supply about half of Adelaide's annual water needs.

Players first learn what each component of the plant does, then place the components in the correct order and test the result. A separate screen called The Lab holds background information for every piece, so the facts needed for the puzzle stay within reach during play.

A correctly assembled plant runs smoothly. A wrong order sets off one of several failure scenarios, and the misplaced blocks fly back to the bin to be placed again. Scoring rewards speed and few wrong decisions, with bonuses for players who read every component description and find the bonus facts.

The game is aimed at lower secondary students. Its stated learning outcomes are the path water takes from the ocean to the tap, the role of each component in the Adelaide plant, and the engineering and environmental features of how that plant works.

Three awards from 2015 are tied to the game. Monkeystack's awards page lists Best Mobile Game and Best Serious Game at I/ITSEC in Orlando, and Best Serious Game at Simtect in Australasia, each naming Project Desal and SA Water. The game was also reported as a winner of the Best Business Developed Serious Game (international) category at the I/ITSEC Serious Games Showcase and Challenge.

Monkeystack's website is online in November 2026. It describes the studio as a multidisciplinary creative production studio based at Adelaide Studios in Glenside, South Australia, and its front page does not mention Project Desal. The App Store address that was published for the game no longer loads, so no current download page is known. Whether the app can still be installed on an iPad is not confirmed.