For our midterm project in Yury Gitman's Interactive Major Studio, we made a teddy bear that had a beating heart, lungs, and tons of sensors that felt chest compressions, its physical orientation (with an accelerometer, ) the instruments placed into its mouth, and a magnet to trip the switch we placed in the "paddle" that would restart his heart.

Here is how the trauma bear play testing went down (maddest possible props to Tracy for editing this):

and here's a clip of what we did leading up to this:

Attached here is the prototype document for the first prototype of "Phevo."

See the files below for significant builds.

phevo-0.0.6

First interaction test

phevo-0.0.12

Second interaction test

phevo-0.0.13

First prototype

phevo-0.0.22

Pre-Second prototype

phevo-0.0.27

Second prototype, with Windows executable in the "dist" directory

phevo-0.0.31

Third prototype

phevo-0.0.33

Alpha release

Here are a few snaps of our build day on Sunday for the Trauma Bear project. It has really come together:

Guts Of the Machine

On the heels of our wildly successful play test of the trauma bear, I bring to you images of the ursine innards.

Arduino

Breadboard

Breadboard and Arduino Connected

And here's a brief video of the experience:

Challenge

Can you adapt an existing game to make it a focused teaching experience?

Problem

Topic

Teaching children about the habitats, behaviors and characteristics of animals.

Audience

Reading-age elementary school children.

Setting

Elementary school classrooms, particularly during free periods or group work.

Problem

How can a card game in the style of Apples to Apples be used to help children identify the different attributes associated with a variety of animals?

So, we have working game code for the trauma bear. See the attachments for that.

The first file the processing code and the second is the arduino code.

Photos and videos to come.

So, we've got that main processing code ready to go! Sort of. Inti has kicked ass getting the physical states codified, and the processing code looks great with the graphics that Tracy posted. I now need to combine the physical pieces that Jay has built for the intubation and ventilator and accelerometer (all of which are killer!) with the Arduino code with the finished state machine and get the thing running.

Very, very soon, this bear will live! And then die!

Processing code is attached below.

For my final project in Parsons D&T bootcamp, I created a site called fattofatto.org that was designed to promote the sport of bocce in New York City. I have a real love for the game, so this was a fun project, especially making mini-documentaries by interviewing other players and building a game based bocce's basic skills. Fatto!