Week 9

Week 9 - 5/27/14

During the past week, our group was selected to present for the class during week 9, as opposed to week 10 like most of the other groups. This decision was made because our group, along with one other, was far enough along in the project to present, pictured below is the completed game board and all applicable components.

 We prepared for the presentation by completing the final components required, including the final game board, repairs on an animal model that had broken, and final work on the app. The board was completed by having a high quality draft of the board printed on poster paper and applied to a stock game board. The animal piece that was fixed was the mouse piece that was broken accidentally in the previous lab. Additional work that was done included additions to the rules to compensate for the change in the general idea of the board game that we had decided; meaning that it was more geared towards educational purposes, rather than simply entertainment. Also, the game manual was created to go along with the game, as pictured below.

Week 8

Pet Pal Adventure is nearly completed. The app was in a beta stage but now a final version is being worked and shall be ready for the presentation. The game board was a rough prototype and it was redesign and a new broad was ordered up. The new design is shown below

The new broad compared to the old design has the animals ordered based on their speed value and the needs and change card spaces are placed at specific points on the broad. The game cards andf other pieces of the game are printed and painted and ready to.

Week 7

The printing of the 3d models has been completed and the board game pieces have been picked up. Overall, all of the pieces are in great condition. However, one piece, the fish was apparently misprinted, because it is quite deformed. It is pictured below.

We are going to attempt to fix it through conventional methods such as sanding and superglue. Pictured below are the rest all of the 3d printed models.

The design of the game board has been completed and is ready to be sent in to be printed. All components of the board game should be ready to demonstrate by class next week, for the in class demonstration. The app that is being created to go along with the board is almost ready to be used alongside the game. As a group, we are attempting to come up with more ways to incorporate engineering concepts into our project. We decided that the best method for doing this would be to change the way that the game is won. The method that we are going with now is to make the rules for winning be to circles around the board a certain number of times. Each animal will have a certain "speed value." In order to move around the board, you will multiply your roll by all of your animals speed values added together. That way, the more animals that you have, the more likely that you are to win. Furthermore, in order to pick up a pet, the player will have to answer a math or science related question about that animal. These concepts of math and science gear the game much more towards learning the basic concepts of engineering.

Week 6

Today the members of the group discussed what has been accomplished so far on the project, and what still needs to be finished. David stated that the pet pieces were finished and would be printed soon on the 3D printer. The final layout for the game board was finished on AutoCad and was sent it to Raphael. He will be using his skills with Photoshop to enhance the game board and make it more appealing to kids. Kristopher had already written up some of the ideas for Chance cards but needed more and asked David and Morgan if they could help. The plan was to make twenty Chance cards with different expressions, those twenty cards would then each be doubled, which would create forty cards. We plan on having fifty Chance cards altogether, so the other ten would be unique with special situations for the players. By the end of class today, virtually all of the Chance cards had been written except for a few. The instructor confronted us and told us that we could still continue with our toy design, but we needed to incorporate an engineering aspect to it. As a group, we brainstormed what we could do that would satisfy the requirements for the project. It was agreed that we would create an application for cellular devices. This app would be used to randomly generate one of the Chance cards each time a player tapped a button. The rules will be changed so that whenever a player lands on a chance space, that player will tap the button on the application and a random Chance card will be generated. The player will then read whatever the card says, and complete the action. Kristopher is a computer science major who readily agreed to create the app, and the rest of the group volunteered to help him out in any way that we could.