THE CHALLENGE

In September 2012, I was among a group of fourth year Knowledge Integration students at the University of Waterloo taking a senior design course. The design project was to design and install a museum exhibit to be displayed in the !dea Gallery at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Ontario. This exhibit would run from April 2013 to August 2013, and match the theme of the larger traveling exhibit, Game On 2.0. We called the exhibit “Game Changer.”

 

THE APPROACH

The design process of this exhibit had four main stages; initial proposal, final proposal, and installation. The process was very iterative, with a lot of thought and research put into the final design. As the design process took 8 months and was a group effort by 14 students, it strengthened our ability to work well as a team.

The design and installation of Game Changer was also a very collaborative effort. Many aspects of the exhibit, from creating the overall design and deciding what the visitor experience will look like, to building and installing the exhibit, were done collaboratively. In the later stages of the design process and the early stages of the build process, my focus was on the visitor interaction with the exhibit. Along with a sub-group of two others, I worked on designing, coding, and wiring the interactive components of the exhibit.

In the museum exhibit there was a cooperative challenge for visitors asking them to gain points by playing mini-games and finding hidden (or “easter-egg”) content. The points were displayed on a screen in the section called “Make an Impact”. Once a visitor finished playing a mini-game, lights would direct the viewer to the “Make an Impact” screen so that they could watch the points-counter increase. This points system included coding and wiring multiple arduinos, LED lights, and buttons for visitors to interact with, and making sure that the mini-games were simple enough to require minimal explanation. Other buttons in the exhibit would display hidden content by lighting up or by turning on a seemingly broken screen. I was involved in some of the coding and wiring, and was heavily involved in designing the interaction experience.

THE RESULTS

Game Changer taught visitors about how video games  and gamification can be used to tackle real world problems. The exhibit used a “Video Game Agency” theme to give visitors agent personas to help the agency gain points by learning and engaging in activities throughout the exhibit.

“Game Changer exhibition was not only great in content and very engaging for visitors, but it was the best executed exhibition by students, with the least maintenance problems ever (and I am not exaggerating). We are very grateful for this.”

-Ana Klasnja, Senior Multimedia Producer, Ontario Science Centre

You can read more about the Game Changer website on the Game Changer website. You can read more about the !dea Gallery on the Ontario Science Centre website.