Project Goals:

Our project is designed to give young kids (age range 5-10 years old) an introduction to basic logic principles, coding ideas, and robotic fun. We were tasked with creating a game for a playground that achieves these goals.

• To design and fabricate a robotic game intended for playground use
• Help build a foundation of logic skills in young kids
• Use sensors and actuators for physical interaction with the kids
• simple interface designed for kids

Overview:

The class was split up into groups of 6, and each group of 6 was split further into 3 subgroups of 2. I paired with Noah, and we decided to build an interactive marble track game where kids would insert a marble into the machine, and would have to complete a series of puzzles to unlock ‘gates’ for the marble to progress further down the track. While our ambitions wanted to create multiple puzzles along the track, the reality was both Noah and I made one game each. Noah created a distance puzzle using an ultrasonic sensor. Users would have to determine the optimal distance to stand at to unlock the gate, guided by an array of lights depicting hot/cold or too close/too far. My game was a memorization pattern game, users would see a pattern of lights and would have to re-input the pattern. Repeated three times correctly, the gate would open.

Bill of Materials:

Project Documentation:

First iteration:

My sequence game, attached to the playground

This project had a midpoint presentation where we presented the games to a panel of judges for advice. While our marble track worked, there were still a few flaws. Our main issues were:

• The LEDs weren’t bright enough to compete with direct sunlight so it could be difficult to see the pattern
• If a player previously completed the distance challenge, there wasn’t enough time to run down to the bottom half to see the first pattern
• The buttons weren’t all working properly
• The ball would have too much velocity exiting and could fly out of the ending basin