2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Bee My Guide: An Interactive Journey Back Home (BMG) is human-sized video game with mechatronics, being developed by senior capstone design students, Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) students, high school students, elementary school students, and a professional composer, to be shown to the public in November 2024. The project involves students majoring in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial design, mechanical engineering, and computational media. Camera-based computer vision software recognizes the pose of the player. The player’s pose controls the game and changes the displayed video, mechatronics, lighting, music, voices and sound effects. The game will be built in four separate sections. In the narrative, a bee video character has become lost because of a storm and needs the player’s help to get back to his hive. In each of the first three sections, the player is guided by an animatronic narrator and plays mini games to earn a numerical clue. In the last section, the player uses the three clues to open the hive so Mr. Bee can rejoin his family and friends. A bar code ticketing system will keep track of the player’s progress through the sections and collect player statistics.
The paper will highlight some of the educational and organizational methods used in the first two semesters of the BMG project. The project began in the Spring 2023 semester, when the narrative and early prototypes were designed, and different types of hardware and software were explored for sound design, pose recognition, and the ticketing system. The paper will discuss how the narrative design process was completed in the first four weeks, including digital storytelling assignments, how the narrative was selected, and how key scenes and narrative elements were identified. Next, the paper will discuss how the VIP students were refocused on ideation and design for the various video, mechatronic, and sound components of the game. The paper will discuss how the faculty leaders of the project engaged a local elementary school over Summer 2023 with a way that the elementary students will contribute artwork that will be applied by the VIP students in the video design. The VIP enrollment doubled in the Fall 2023 semester, relative to Spring 2023. The paper will discuss how the many new students were brought up to speed quickly and gained a sense of ownership in the overall project. Then, the paper will focus on the multidisciplinary collaboration in the construction of Cappy the Caterpillar, the narrator in Section 2, and on the lip sync control of all three animatronic narrators. This work should be of interest to the multidisciplinary engineering community and the STEAM education community, in terms of resources and ideas for integrating engineering and the arts and widely disparate age groups within an experiential project-based learning context.