Loes and Tamara facilitated the workshop. The objective of the workshop was to have a lot of fun. We were introduced to MakeyMakey (check out some video’s here). We were thrilled by the possibilities of hacking any object and turn it into a controller, even bananas! Combined with a program like Scratch an interactive installation can be built at any moment. Because the Olympics started last weekend (and Holland was in a medal frenzy), Loes and Tamara assigned us to make an Olympic related game.
During the openings ceremony, one of the Olympic rings did not open. So we were inspired to create the Olympic Ring Game.
We turned a simple ball game into an Olympics themed game, with a physical interface to match the theme. With scratch, we made a program that assigned the player to throw the ball to a specific color. If the player hits the right color, the player is being awarded with 10 points. The computer randomly assigns the player to hit another ring (or the same, as happened during the demo). After 5 rounds, the game is over and the players wins!
The game was very simple yet satisfying. It was easy to extend the game in a variety of ways, but we didn’t have enough time. It was nice to get introduced to physical computing and maybe we can use some of these tools (or a similar system) in our project. We definitely had a lot of fun during the workshop, so well done Tamara & Loes!
