Instead of posting this twice, I would like to refer you now to my wonderful partner Sushima’s blog. We wrote the blog together, recaping our journey, and hope you have enjoyed following along with us. Until we meet again!
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As we come close to the end of our semester, and as the work that is due somehow seems to have doubled before my eyes, my partner Sushima and I are coming to the end of our work on our Digital History Project. Needless to say, the grandiose idea that we had started with at the beginning of the semester has over time dwindle down to something that is more of a prototype, as opposed to a full on gaming experience. Why you may ask? Well, for one, Sushima and I quickly realised that we are not exactly at one with programming and processing lingo. This journey has definitley been both a trying and at times fulfilling experience.
We overestimated what we WANTED to do as opposed to what we actually COULD do. What does this mean? It means that having lego pieces activate buttons on 9 positions and making questions appear and have lights light up if questions were answered correctly was a little bit out of our range of possibility. Still, we have been working to at least achieve the minimum in an effort to perhaps one day build on this.
Understanding processing language has been almost as confusing as grade 12 calculus. Which, by the way, is why I chose history. I guess that high school Vice Principle that I begged to let me drop calculus is somewhere laughing and telling me that I should have stuck that out…maybe it would have come in handy….maybe.
Currently, we have been able to write the skeleton of the script, with the questions that we want and more or less what we want the game to do. Our one major source of frustration at the moment is getting the processing program to recognize when a button is pushed, to wait, and not play out the entire program. Once we have this problem fixed, which we are determined to do, we will then be able to add a few buttons and some LED’s on the arduino to make the game a little more interactive in its prototype state.
Stay tuned, keep your fingers crossed, and here’s hoping that success is just around the corner!!
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So, for the past few weeks in our digital class, we have been attempting to make the led light on our Arduino board light up at the same time as the circle turns black on our processing screen by pushing a button. Needless to say, we were becoming quite frustrating. If we could get firmata to work properly, there was a better chance that writing the script for our project would be just a bit simpler.
While my computer updated, we decided to make another attempt at a sketch up of our exhibit ideas so that we could start to have a clear picture. Using google sketch up, we came up with this:
( and yes…if someone could find us a giant lego we would greatly appreciate it…)
After updating my computers software three times (which by the way it now works like a dream….note to self: using 4 year old software will not only slow things down, but also make it impossible for more recent technology to work on your computer) my partner Sushima and I met again, for one more attempt at making firmata work.
We set up our arduino and plugged into our now properly functioning computer:
(readers note: yes i realize the picture is sideways. For some unknown reason, wordpress would not allow me to save the photo once i had rotated it, and instead of taking out my frustration at this and throwing my computer against the wall, I decided to leave it this way. Let’s just call it an artistic choice)
The full product looked like this:
For the fourth time, we opened Arduino, downloaded the firmata software. We ran a blink sketch and all was working well. We closed arduino and imported the firmata library into processing. We ran the necessary program which was intended so that our LED button would light up and the circle from the processing program was supposed to turn black when the push button on the arduino was pushed.
We ran the code, we held each others hands….. the light started blinking! the circle appeared on the computer screen! Now, for the moment of truth… Sushima, trepidatious, reached for the push button and pushed it….. the light blinked! the circle turned black!!! We had done it!! I’m sure those of you who are more schooled in the world of processing, arduino and frimata may be chuckling and saying that this was just introductory stuff, and it only gets harder. But let me tell you, after a few weeks of nothing and feeling quite dejected, we finally had a breakthrough and can now hopefully attack our project with a much brighter outlook on the whole thing!!
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Back from reading week, and wishing in some ways that we were still on break, it is time to resume our digital adventure.
20 minutes into class….we’re already lost.
(this pattern will continue…be patient with us)
We wanted to be keeners and get it all working right away, but we then soon realized that just getting to understand how the Touch Shield worked was our most important task for the day. It doesn’t look that intimidating, but let me tell you…this perplexed us and still does!
We set about trying to figure out how to get the touch shield to do anything, after much trial, error and frustration (admittedly mainly on my behalf) Sushima had a stroke of genius! She was able to wire the touch shield and set up the simple programming steps which allowed us to touch any of the numbers on the shield and have it appear on the computer screen!!
This kept us entertained for a few minutes, until we decided to move on from there. Questions once again arose. How do we make it so that our little Lego man registers on the Touch Shield?
Although the picture is adorable, it does not in fact work so easily. We then soon realized that we needed to add programming into this equation. We want to be able to make the arduino and programing match up, so that when we register with the arduino, what we’ve programmed appears on the screen as we’ve written it. This may be a bit over our heads, but we are going to attempt as best we can to at least make it work once. Nine times might be stretching it, once I think will be considered quite the victory.
Until then…
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WE’S BE BLOGGING ..AGAIN! Our stress is your stress, so welcome to our installment (by Laura and Sushima). This week we learnt all about Google Sketchup and it CHANGED OUR LIFE! It is the coolest, awesomest and unbelievably easiest program we’ve encountered thus far in the Exhibit Design Class.
This is what we imagine our YE OLD HISTORY SQUARES game (a new day calls for a new title for the game).
"Ye Old History Squares"
This process is clearly very technical
Looks likes the most exciting game in the world.
Option 1
A button would be located above the LCD screen. When a contestant pressed that button a question i.e. “Who was Henry 8th’s 1st Wife? a) Catherine Parr b) Catherine of Aragon”. If contestants think the answer is “A” then they press the button titled “Answer A”. If it’s right, “Correct” would appear on the screen then the contestant would have the option to place one of their 5 Lego man pieces (each contestant has their own colour-coordinated set of pieces) onto the square of their choosing. If they answer the question wrong, Contestant B gets to answer.
How to win
(warning: we have no clue. It’s a stressful process)
Danger! Danger!
Do we install a sensor that recognizes when a contestant gets 3-IN-A-ROW?
Is it just self-validation? “Yayy I won”
What if we installed RFID Tags on the faces of each Lego man piece and then a sensor installed on top of the LCD screen will recognize when three are placed in a row? (Is this possible with the distance we’ve estimated between the screen section and the game board?)
Option 2
Each circle=a hole in the baseboard through which the wires can be threaded down to the Arduino. On the circle is a button and on the button is a lego man (and the green grass grows all around all around). The stand-up section of the board features an LCD screen which displays the question and the text “Answer A and B” corresponds to buttons that contestants can press to answer the question.
When the contestant presses on a Lego man
SIMPLICITY
1. Establish one square. Wire a green light and a red light, a button that communicates a question to the LCD screen (figure out how to program an LCD screen, i guess the programming will happen in the Arduino program), 2 buttons repping Answer A and B. If the contestant gets the question right, they press on the corresponding light in the square they chose. If they get the question wrong, everything remains blank.
Visual aides are fun!!
*stay tuned for updates!
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If you are anything like me, you most likely and often find yourself committing an entire day to watching a Band Of Brothers marathon on t.v. (Sure, you could put in the DVD collector’s edition set that you no doubt own, but its just not the same without the commercials right?) You also probably enjoy any World War I or World War II documentary and may even base some of your vacations around museums or destinations that have some link to either of those wars (I apologize once again to all of my friends that I have dragged to many a war museum!). As much as I truly enjoy learning about the military campaigns and soldiers stories, sometimes I find myself wanting to be better informed about life on the home-front for Canadians. I’ve spent a great deal of my educational career invested in all aspects of American history which has unfortunately kept me fairly distracted from being more informed about my own nation’s history.
I have always enjoyed the social side of history. Learning facts and figures is one thing, but learning about how people interacted with each other and even what their daily lives were like hundreds or even fifty years ago is something I find truly fascinating. As part of my Research Assistant position at the University of Western Ontario, while working on my M.A., I have been involved with this website: http://wartimecanada.ca. It launched on tuesday and already has a collection of over 400 artifacts with thousands more to follow. It is an interesting archive because it provides people with the access to material that has either been forgotten about or that they had no idea ever existed. It covers a wide range of topics: from fighting, to relaxing, to nutrition. There are menus about how to properly ration your food to training manuals for Canadian high school students. All of the artifacts are unique because they give us insight into the way Canadian society functioned during wartime.
This has been an exciting project to work on and there are many more artifacts waiting to be uploaded. The social side of war is something that I personally have little knowledge about because I was not aware, until I began work on this project, that artifacts and information about it still existed. If you are interested in history, and Canada’s wartime history in particular, I encourage you to take a look at this site. For those of you with school age children, this site is an excellent treasure trove of material that they may not be able to find anywhere else. For all you teachers out there, use some of these artifacts in your history lessons. Make learning history more interactive by maybe trying to duplicate a wartime recipe. The end result may not be the most delicious outcome, but the learning experience will no doubt be much more enjoyable and memorable!
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“WE’S BE BLOGGING AT BREADSTICKS”
Coming up with a digital history interactive exhibit is not as straightforward and simple as one would imagine. My partner Sushima and I spent the better part of our day mulling over ideas for our final project. If you were to just ask, every single idea we had was of course brilliant. BUT, as we started to dissect each idea, we soon began to realize that they were a great deal more involved than our skills would allow.
We be blogging
Here’s how it started:
1) LEGO MURDER MYSTERY = basically, we want to create a lego structure that would be interactive and educational. Based on the brilliant BBC series “SHERLOCK” (if you haven’t watched it, stop reading and go do that now and then come back) we would build a historical crime scene that features LCD screens and weight sensors in order for users to solve a historical crime. Users would lift up certain objects and based on the displacement of weight, the clue would be narrated by the talented Adrian Petry or Doug McGlynn. Just like the high-functioning sociopath aka Sherlock where all misplaced details are critical clues; the user would learn how to think critically and notice details.
PROBLEM = The sensors would be difficult to process? Would users actually be learning anything worthwhile? Is it interesting enough?
2) LEGO CRIME SOLVERS (see a pattern yet??, if you were Sherlock you would…) = We could recreate a London city-scape and when the little lego man is placed in a certain place on the map, they would receive a clue about the crime.
PROBLEM = Building an entire city. IF they couldn’t build Rome in a day, there’s no way we’re building London in a month. As well, what is the user taking away? Are they learning anything? We would also need to develop a serious script…which…may be a bit out of our league.
3) LEGO HISTORICAL EVENT = In this scenario, we would continue to use lego but we would build a specific scene, historically based of course. When a user points to a specific object, or focus in on it, historical facts and information would be projected onto the mini LCD screen.
PROBLEM = Is it interesting enough? Is it original enough? What specific event would we choose? (“Throughout time, man has engaged in many battles – physical and intellectual.” Which one to choose?)
This seems to be the most viable – based on our level of techie skills. Maybe we create the Battle of the Thames scene and each lego piece is attached to a sensor. When that piece is moved anywhere on the board an audio clips is projected. I.E. The Tecumseh piece could move out of the forest and users would hear one of his quotes projected out of an attached speaker.
4) LEGO HOLLYWOOD SQUARES = A grid split up into squares and already filled with historical figures (made out of lego possibly? or styrofoam and felt?). A sensor would recognize when contestants point at a specific historical figure. The contestant would have to answer a question about that character or an associated event. If they answer correctly, an LED light in the square will light up in green, if wrong, red.
Positives – we get to use a multitude of King and Queen lego pieces (already acquired). IE Henry the 8th in the middle surrounded by his 6 wives, Bloody Mary and Elizabeth 1st.
Ladies and gentlemen WE HAVE A WINNER. Lego hollywood squares might be the answer to all of our problems.
Grad School Probs part Deux soon to follow…..
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