William Dalstø

Result

A video explaining and demonstrating our project.

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Lesson plan

As per the brief, the learning experience will ultimately happen inside a classroom, meaning it will be incorporated into a school module, even though we were not required to heed any of official learning outcomes on UDIR or elsewhere in our design. Meaning we will have to consider our learning experience within the confines of a lesson plan.

Bringing it all together, the lesson begins with an introduction to the overarching concept and some general rules which applies to both the analogue and digital games. Afterwards, the class is split in half: Team Analogue and Team Digital, where the teacher will quickly brief the students on the narrative. Then each team is split in two yet again: one group will be defusing the bomb, while the other group has access to the bomb manual which they have to decode. After 25 minutes, the team will have the opportunity to switch games, so that both teams gets to experience both the analogue and digital bomb. After yet another 25 minutes, the two teams are disbanded, returning to being a class as a whole. The teacher then gives the students some prompts to make them reflect on the experience and how it applies to their lives as a whole beyond the classroom.

Pedagogical theories

Vygotskys proximal learning zone.

Reflection

During playtesting we experienced that engagement dropped in the first and last part of the lesson, because it followed a traditional lecture format. An interesting iteration on the lesson plan would be to try incorporating the reflection prompts into the game itself, in attempt to circumvent the traditional teacher-student lecture dynamic.

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Communication modes

The key aspect of our concept is the communication happening between the bomb defusers and bomb manual decoders.

Team Analogue

We made a thread track device to simulate snailmail. How slow physical communication is and thus how deliberate one has to be in what information one sends.

Notifications with a honking horn.

They are only allowed to communicate through drawings.

Team digital

We handed the students our smartphones to communicate with.

Students cannot communicate in Norwegian.

The students are allowed to arrange for what kind of code language they wish to use.

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Bomb manual

The second part of our concept was the bomb manual which holds the key to defusing the bomb, hidden in encrypted puzzles.

Although not the primary feature of our design, it was inspired by escape room puzzles.

Analogue puzzles

Professor Rumlegås has gone missing! Homemade sketchy aesthetic.

Digital puzzles

Google street map

Inspect wikpedia page — make the students feel like real hackers

Code hidden in console of a webpage

USB disk containing various files

Ctrl f through a faux vg front page

Prowling through suspicious posts in a social media hashtag

Visiting the internet web archived page of a dead link website

Looking for hidden messages in the web search history of a web browser

Looking through a youtube video for recurring iconography

Listening for morse in an audio file or blinking lights

An idea was to make the students plug in their phone to the computer with a USB cable for narrative immersion.

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Digital bomb

We unfortunately didn’t achieve as high finish on the digital bomb as we did on the analogue bomb. We originally planned to make the digital bomb into an actual interactive website, but our teacher urged us to stick to Figma, since that’d make it easier to iterate our design.

In hindsight, we should have been more stubborn about following our original plan, because all the pupils figured out they could cheat by pressing the arrow keys, instead of actually doing the escape room puzzles to properly defuse the bomb.

Narrative

The narrative of the digital game was that the police have arrested some members of a hacker group who have created a virus bomb that will publish all the pictures on their phones, essentially «face raping» the players as it’s called, unless they defuse the bomb.

Visual design

For ease of iteration we initially decided on a simple flat UI look, although we later on also played with the idea of adding a more hacker aesthetic through the use of binary, ASCII art, 1337 hackerspeak, and hiding the answers inside of actual javascript code.

Coding

Although unfinished, this is what the plan for the code was.

Nb!!! This post is a work in progress!

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Analogue «bomb» with Arduino

Making the physical bomb was a challenging and very rewarding experience. It’s created with Arduino placed in a suitcase. None in the group had ever touched Arduino before, and we only had one person who had a little experience with MicroBit, so huge props to @gyllenstendesign for figuring it out in the end!

Arduino

Since we had no experience with Arduino, we scoured the internet for tutorials. Initially we wanted to recreate this bomb made by Alastair Aitchison, but we unfortunately didn’t have the same exact materials that he used, and trying to adapt the code to fit the materials we did have would be too over-ambitious for this project. Therefore our quest continued for a tutorial that fit the electronics we had on hand. Eventually we began looking through GitHub and discovered this tutorial made by Raphaël Champeimont, which is what we ended up using in the end. We even got in touch with the creator, who helped us figure stuff out.

Suitcase

After the "guts" was settled, we began working on the "shell". We bought a suitcase off Finn.no, and created a wooden mount to place the electronics on. One challenge was that the breadboard we used had already been taped onto a lasercut frame by the people we purchased it from, so some of the wires which were not supposed to be cut were unfortunately visible. To signal to the players that these wires should be left alone, we wrote a note in the suitcase and color coded these wires black and red. Meanwhile the wires that should be cut, we made colorful and wrote a note telling the players that these wires could be cut.

To add to the narrative, we filled a soda bottle with green soap water and pasted a sticker on it to make it look like a biohazard bomb. We also used some gold and black striped tape, which added to the narrative flair.

Reflection

Given more time, we could have tried out connecting our bomb to a speaker, and thus added sound effects like the final explosion and the ticking countdown timer, which could make the game more responsive to user input.

As for the suitcase, we could have tried getting our hands on another breadboard, which would have allowed us to hide the guts fully underneath the "shell". Or even better, we could have gotten to actually solder everything together. Although we tried to avoid permanently soldering anything, because we wanted to preserve the parts for use in future projects.

We also had a little fun talking about glitter bombs when ideating the analogue bomb, and talked about maybe creating a confetti explosion. Since an actual glitter bomb is a bit much, and having glitter stuck everywhere forever probably wouldn’t be very popular with the people who has to clean it up.

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Norwegian Museum of Science and Tehnology (TM)

The project began with a preliminary visit to the new I/O exhibition at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, for which we were tasked with designing an interactive learning experience for middle schoolers.

The exhibition uses

Wandering the exhibition, we were struck by how much we missed the software inside the different electronical appliances in the exhibition. For instance, what does a smart home device from the 70s sound like? What was it like to use flip cellphones? How would it blink and beep? How does a home assistance robot from the 80s behave? How did the operating system on the first apple computer look like and behave? What was the actual interaction between the user and the interface like way back when?

Conclusion