Proof of concept project done for a capstone project under a Curriculum and Instruction course at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. It involve working with partners from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis to design a prototype that can promote their family learning goal that involves having children and parents interact through hands on activities. It aimed to teach 4 to 8 year old the importance of collaboration by participating in being either the conductor or engineer to be able to operate the train to safety.
Undergraduate students from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign: Zhiqing Zheng; Ivan Liu, Xue Lin;
- By providing a goal that requires two people to participate to achieve, this game aimed to give a chance to construct an idea of the importance of collaboration by exploring a simple train operation.
- The project was build to run on windows computers through an .exe file. By opening two instances of the application or build, one can connect them together to play by serving either the conductor or engineer role.
- Localization in Chinese was added to be able to do observations of children in America and China to assess engagement, collaboration, and learning.
- A game mechanic that incorporates modularity was constructed to be able to add different tiles that require different goals. Thus, the game can offer both a randomized mechanic or a linear one.
- Assets were developed using GIMP, Inkscape and Blender.
- Uses LAN features to connect different devices to play together.