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Studio Project - Prototyping 

After our group formulated our idea the Avacardo, this week we prototyped what this would physically look like and be used for using a storyboard. This is a great and effective way to begin to visualise ideas and physically touch them. Its a good step from just an Idea (not knowing if it’s workable or good), to a physical illustration of the project and idea. 

We are also working on a pitch document for the idea. This process is extremely beneficial to work through all the aspects of the idea, again to assess if the idea is viable. What the idea is, who the project is for, what problem/issue its solving - is it actually needed/wanted. Out of these questions that we were told to ask ourselves we decided to do a survey in our class to see if our problem is actually a problem and needed. The results of this survey will be in the pitch so stay tuned.

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Makey Makey instrument - Feet & balls

We decided to make our instrument more of a band/group operated setup. Each ball operates another seperate sound effects controlled by the program Scratch. The idea being that the users will pass around the ball between their hands at different speeds, creating different beats. With 3 different sound effects (kick drum, snare, high hat) a cool beat can be created with teamwork and interaction between people. 

Things that didn’t work well was that if the user didn’t continue to pass the ball between their hands the sound effect would loop until the circuit was broken again.

Things that went well was, our group was the only group that made a group interactive instrument, involving everyone in the group.

Was a lot of fun seeing all the different designs and out workings of the brief.

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1st Programming Assignment - Completed

After a significant amount of grief attempting to put this together. I successfully have finished my first programming assignment! Colours and random and the ellipses and rectangles move well with the mouse. I put in a solid attempt at the bonus point, hopefully Stefan likes it lol. Im ready to get into more processing stuff, it’s fun when IT WORKS. But yerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, surely A+ vibes.

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SCRATCH - Literally what the heck is this

Yesterday i spent an embarrassing amount of time tryna figure out this program. Its actually quite powerful and can do a lot of tings. Also there’s a massive collections of sounds that make making an instrument easy with the makey makey. As we dive deeper into the program and task we conceptualised a band with interactive elements that aren’t specifically tied to general instruments. As we move forward adding more sounds and interactive elements.

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Ben 10 - cool concept, hard method

Our Ben10 board games aim is to collect tokens, once the tokens are collected they are placed on the board. Once all the tokens are placed down, the player returns to the start and they win. 

Hacking the board game was fun and we played with many ideas but with the short time we had we stuck with the idea to make all the tokens turn on “points lights” when they collect tokens. Our method was great, we had a few working but due to the fragility of the copper tape, the connections weren’t very solid. Making the hack hard to pull off. 

Although the concept and idea would have vastly improved the users experience and interaction with the game, the practicality of the hack in the time given wasn’t realistic.  oh and the makey makey was used as a button in the middle of the board to streamline the dice use, for the users to move around the board with out having dice pushing tokens and players all across the board.

Overal Ben 10/10

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We do be drillin tho - making some holes in our ben10 game for LEDs

After a quick induction into the makers space, we decided to drill holes in our board for our LEDs, the drill is fun to use, just always gotta remember to clean up the dust!. Thats the most important thing ever, other than safety and blogging. Designs for the board varied with several failed attempts at our idea, we finally have come across a working design! swag. we litt. teamwork is fun.

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Makey Makey - Joystick

My first day using Makey Makey went surprisingly well. Very easy to use, here's a little playdough joystick me and my group made to control a plane simulator game on a laptop. It worked well, main key is BE GENTLE!

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First Loopy - The relationship between ignorance and climate change

My first loopy was me playing around with the relationship between ignorance and climate change; and how that relationship initially sparks a global impact but finally through the negative outcomes of the impacts of this relationship, ignorance around the issue of climate change decreases, sparking change and hopefully allowing us to manage climate change.

Unfortunately western culture accommodates significant levels of ignorance to global issues that effect us today, a big one being climate change. This culture of “its not my problem”, “what can we do?”, “its barely happening”, fuels the western ignorance while drought, bushfires and rising sea levels are impacting people globally. Ignorance in large amounts are driven by political and economical reasons; for example, USA leaving the Paris agreement because the deal would kill jobs. 

As humans it’s our nature to form patterns of delayed and inadequate responses to issues. Hopefully, given that the impacts of climate change are already distinguishable globally, this time, we wont let it be too late and go too far before we take action.

- Stay safe, stay swag