Interactive Game Exhibit
One project in my Cornerstone course was to create an interactive game exhibit in collaboration with Kadence Arts to be displayed at the Boston Children's Museum where children of all ages could use the game. See event information here.
Goal:
Create an interactive game for children that will help develop motor skills and/or cognitive skills. The game will be on display at the Boston Children's Museum for one day in which children will play with the game, so it must be durable enough to survive a full day in the museum. The concept must also include one 3D printed piece.
Idea:
Our original idea was to create a wall with multiple holes in it. Each hole would be equipped with an LED light. These lights would illuminate to indicate to the player which hole the player should aim for. For the 3D printed component, we wanted to print a catapult arm to make the game more challenging by requiring the ball to be launched through the holes by catapult.
Initial Project Concept
Test Run of Final Game Project
Results:
Our final design differed from the initial idea in that we decided to turn the wall into a round disk which was to be mounted on a motor to spin the targets and create a higher difficulty level for older, more advanced users. I took the lead on this project and headed the majority of the Arduino coding of the project as well as quite a bit of the physical building of the system. Initially, our disk was mounted on the motor, but upon initial testing, we noticed that we often had to chase the ball after each throw. Because of this, I designed a box around the back along with a simple ball return system. The return system involved slanted bottom boards to push the ball toward a ramp on the left side of the contraption. Additionally, LEDs were added into the center of the disk. I coded these LEDs to output one of four colors using a for loop and a random number generator. Once the light was
for loop and a random number generator. Once the light was displayed, the user knew which holes to aim for. Additionally, I attached break beam sensors to each hole to be able to recognize when the ball successfully goes into the holes. These sensors could tell when a ball broke the light beam and therefore went through the hole. I then coded these sensors to match the number so that if one of the holes that corresponded to the colored light shown was hit, then a positive audio was played and a new target would be chosen while if any other target was his, a negative sound played and the colored light remained the same. I also created all of the SolidWorks drawings for the components. Our final product was featured by Kadence Arts on their instagram.
