Pascal's Tongue: Play Experience Design
October 2019 - December 2019
This was the group project in my "Design Nature" class. It was my introduction to teaming at Olin and to designing for others. The goal was to design a bio-inspired play experience for fourth graders. At the end of the semester, fourth graders from a local elementary school visited to play-test our projects and grade us on them.
My team chose a chameleon for our animal inspiration. Our first step was to do research on our stakeholders to determine their needs and values, starting with online resources describing the developmental stage of fourth graders, and building to interviews with teachers and a few fourth-grader family members. From there, we decided on our design requirements--that the game be safe, fun, equitable, and team-based (rather than competitive)--and began brainstorming possible games.​
After several design reviews with our peers and our professors, we narrowed our ideas down to two. I reached out to a fourth-grade teacher we knew and asked to interview her class about what made a game fun. We met over video chat and asked some general questions before pitching our ideas.
The class gave us a great deal of valuable feedback. ​We created a design matrix to use what we had learned from the class to pick a final direction. We chose to iterate on our "playground jungle" idea, in which participants would climb through an obstacle course to search for bugs using a chameleon-like silicone "tongue" and return the bugs they captured to their families back at the nest.
I worked on constructing the wooden support structure for the "jungle" overhang and the "branch" balance beams. It was important that everything that I built was safe to be clambered on by children. As a team, safety was always our highest concern, and we went through several iterations to ensure that our design met the fire code and all safety guidelines established by our professors. We frequently play-tested the setup ourselves to get a sense of what it would feel like to use, while still keeping in mind the ways in which we were different than the group that we were designing for.​
After more design reviews and play-tests, we were ready for Demo Day, when students from a local elementary school made a field trip to Olin to evaluate our final prototype.​
On Demo Day, groups of fourth graders cycled through the hallway, play-testing everyone's games and recording their thoughts on clipboards. Overall, my team received high marks, with responses ranging from "It was very fun" and "It was a grate game" to "kind of conftewzing."
Here's a video of some fourth graders evaluating our game.