Practical 4

 Practical 4 - Cardboard Game💡📦😁📐🔧🔨

For practical 4, we were tasked on creating a toy that not only will be fun 👾😆🙋to play, but eye catching for our target audience (Primary 3 and 4 children) 👦👧👍👏. We were all each given a cardboard to take home in case of lockdown and thankfully 😊as there wasnt any lockdown, we had to bring back the cardboard and only use that to make the game. We knew that this would not be an easy task 😥💥as we only had 2 hours to do so on the actual date and communication 🦻was a bit harder due to safety distancing 🚷measures which was why the group met online to plan for the game🌈. 

We decided to make a "Pucket Game" which looks like:

💫The reason why we chose to make this game from the endless other possibilities is because:

- Since it’s a two-player game, kids will be able to play with their friends and the interaction/competitiveness between players makes the game a lot more fun and interesting than playing solo it also allows them to socialise and make more friends - the best of both worlds

- This idea makes use of 2 main types of Joineries (score, slots and tabs) in the entire game (see Sketch for illustration) and with the key components being the rectangular miniature table with walls whereby the game is played on, the rubber band slingshot, the middle divider and the individual “pucks”. As such our game’s design is not very complicated to make so we would be able to make it in 2 hours. Moreover, it is a simple game to understand for 9-10 year olds and for them to be able to play. Thus, as a result of the appeal to 9-10 year olds in terms of ease of understanding and being able to play and for us as the “manufacturers” it is easy to build we chose this game. 

How does it work? (Mechanism and objective of the game I.e., 🏆how to win): 🏆

• Shoot pucks from your own side to opposition side.  
• Rubber band will be used to act as a slingshot to “shoot” the “puck” into the opponent's side pf the base 
• Rubber bands will be attached/tied to chopsticks that will be stuck into the base  
• How this game works is that when pulling the rubber band, kinetic energy will be stored into the rubber band and once released the kinetic energy will be transferred to the “puck” and it will be launched. 
• First person to empty their side of the pucks wins or after 2min see who has lesser pucks wins 

👯Our plan on who will make what👯: 

Jerome will make the base

Kai rong will make the internal walls 

Kenny will handle the insertion of the chopsticks after making holes and making the slingshot

Serena will make the pucks.

Below shows our drawings🖉 and what we planned 📝:

Enlarged portions of the plan:

📐Product prototyping📐

Before the actual date itself, our group decided to test out prototyping the toy that we decided on, we decided to do it online, similar to how we did practical 2 because all 4 of us live very far from each other and with the current SMM measures in place we couldnt even meet after school in school. The prototyping was spearheaded by Kairong. We used cardboards that were thrown away, tape and some white glue since we did not have a glue gun. During this prototyping session, we noticed that it was a lot harder than we had anticipated, many small errors due to cutting inaccuracies results in mechanisms that are not so rigid or did not work as well as we thought. 🙌Ultimately this session did serve its purpose on allowing us to prepare items beforehand and allow us to have a certain procedure to follow and be more organized as we would know who would be doing what🙌.

🌈The images below shows the prototyping we did:🌈

To make our game, we first cut out a piece of cardboard as our base and then attached 4 walls to make it a rectangular box shape

We then lay our middle platform into the box.

Then we make 4 holes to stick our chopsticks through and attached a 3 tied rubber band across.  

Lastly, we build the interior walls with sloth to hold them together and sloth the middle divider that has a smaller opening for our puck to pass through. 

Next to make our puck, we draw a small circle on the cardboard and cut it out. Then we layer 3 piece and glue them together to form one puck. 

🌟This is what our finished game looks like 🌟  

😱Issues encountered during prototyping😱

While making the prototype for the game, we realized that were some issues with our design. For example, our middle platform was not very stable and would fall easily with force. Hence, we decided to put supports below:

So first we tried a L-shaped support. This wasn’t very effective as the surface area for support was quite small. Then we tried the triangle-shaped support and the square-shaped support. We found that the triangle-shaped was effective in providing support due to its large surface area for contact and used less cardboard than a square-shaped support. Therefore, we plan to use a triangle-shape support for the middle platform. 

We also found that the interior walls were weak and had a hard time standing by itself. So we decided to add L-shaped tabs to the side of the walls to hold them up. 

 

Here is how it should work...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YWR1jX8tQr8dHiKbRTRfRo-ieBS0bUpU/view?usp=sharing

💪On the actual day + 💭🧠Reflections...

On the actual day itself, we got off on a good start in which we were able to keep on track and everyone was communicating as much as possible while focusing on the task at hand.

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However, somethings didn't go as planned as Dr Noel told us that we couldn't use other materials as the purpose of the activity is CARDBOARD prototyping and if the rubber bands were removed would the toy still work? Yes, it would still work however we wanted to automate the toy to a certain extent thus we kept the rubber band slingshot. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, it meant that using the chopsticks as the support for the tension of the rubber band slingshot wasn't possible because again -> CARDBOAORD prototyping so instead we used parts of the cardboard flute for reinforcing the strength of our 'chopstick' to be able to bear the tension from the rubber band when stretched by the user and rolled it with glue and paper to ensure the external surface of the 'chopstick' is smooth and can provide a good grip to the rubber bands to make our own chopsticks out of paper and carboard for the slingshot.

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At the end we had to present our product and explain why it was unique amongst the class and the class ranked every group from each group's presentation.

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In the end we were not able to catch a full 30 second video depicting our product for the primary school children to view so we decided to take our product back home to improve the visual aesthetic of the product and take a more accurate video depicting how it should have actually worked. With it being an easy game to play, allowing for social interaction and competitive spirit between players and a reinforced visual design, the group hopes that it will be attractive to kids.

Overall, we believe that we fell short on our teamwork as one of our member came late moreover, as we had to revise our design to make our own chopsticks to reduce the number of additional materials that was not cardboard we were a bit flustered and it took us some time which was where our coordination fell short. We were also trying to revise our rubber band slingshot to other means of propelling the puck to just using cardboard to achieve our goal of the game being entirely cardboard so we spent alot of time on that also however in the end we decided to just going with our original idea as rubber band was the only component we used which wasnt a cardboard material with majority of the game being cardboard and we also incorporated joineries. Moreover in terms of the ease of playing and fun level of the game kids would be more willing to play they also have the option of flicking the puck by their own fingers.  

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Below is a time lapse of us working on the product:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YTZUxSnOyrXAvGz1Kz9126Sohivvkd9O/view?usp=sharing

💫This is our final product design and the video: 

It is named "Jumanji Reloaded", we took it home to paint and colour the game to make it more attractive and decided to give it the Land vs Sea concept

With that we came to the end of all practicals for the module with the fablab trainer Mr Mark giving us an insight of a faster, more safer, more accurate method of prototyping -> Laser Cutting Method which only requires the manufacturer to input the drawing of the design and the machine will do the honours, we are extremely excited to use this machine in Sem 2 when we make our actual product in CPD!!👯💥👏👷😝🌈🌟🤩