Music Monkey

Abstract:

Music Monkey is an interactive environment which is designed for the children with physical disabilities that confine them to wheelchairs. This game teaches children how to read musical notations on the scales via interactive game play and teamwork. Through the process of playing games, children will improve their skills of controlling their wheelchairs and learn basic music theories. This game has been tested in the a school in the metropolitan area.

Research Goals:

A. To get close to the community of disable children and understand their behavior patterns, thoughts, concerns and interests.
B. To understand the process of designing products for disable children.

Research Findings:

The whole school has very good facilities. Both the students and the instructors seem to be OK with what they have right now. But afer a depth observations and interviews with the instructors and children there, we find some interesting things:
A. More than half of the children there use wheelchair as their daily transportation tools. So training children to operate the control of their wheelchair safely and skillfully is very important for the school.
B. Almost all the children are very interested in Physical Exercise class. But due to the limitations of the space of the gym, there is only two PE classes for each grade a week Each class is 30 minutes long.
C. In the Drawing class and Music class, children are really bored with the way that the instructor conducts the class. 1/3 students in the class are out of mind, either chatting with each other or looking at somewhere else instead of the blackboard.
D. Speaking of hobbies, there's no difference between disable children and healthy children. They all like toys, video games, sports and etc.

Idea Development:

Based on the academic backgrounds of our group memebers (a programmer, a 3D animator, a cinemaphotographer), we decide to make a digital product instead of a physical device. And then, all of us came up with the idea of making a game since game is a very friendly medium for children to learn stuff. Initially, we tried to come up with ways to remove the children from their chairs and give them some range of movement on a mat, perhaps in the gymnasium. We considered mapping their movements to allow them to draw or control media using only their movement. We also considered mapping their movements to a game, again thinking about the gym. We did come to some understanding, however, that ultimately led us to limit the game play to the wheelchairs. We also decided to focus the game to a specific room, in this case the school's music room, and to turn the game into an educational tool. We were, after all, working with a school. For a game to be accepted in a school, it must teach national and state standards on which students are accessed and school are rewarded. Only if a game does this can teachers justify spending class time on the activity. We intended to apply our own and others' research on disable children to create an appealing game to them. Some of the desired characteristic include:

- Help children learn to operate the control of their wheelchair
- Game interface should be straightforward and easy for children to play
- Cartoon characters can make a game engaging to children
- Not about fighting
- More about playing than winning
- Does not require fast reaction

Design Challenge:

A. Very tight buget (0 dollar) and short time frame (5 weeks. Each member also has at least three other final projects to work on at the same time).
B. Limited access of modifying the space (such as classroom, gym ) since every thing there is designed in a way to keep the children as safe as possible.
C. Limited access to the equippments of the school.

Solutions:

Game Concept:
So at last, we decided to design a musical educational game which is played via driving wheelchair in a classroom.On the screen, there are a group of musical notes on the scales. The player is controling an animation character (a monkey) to hit those notes one by one. When the player finishes hitting all the notes, a piece of music which is composed based on those notes will be played.

Game Play:
We call for two teams of children. On a screen in front of the children, notes appear on a scale. The children drive themselves through the space, and control the movement of the "Music Monkey" on the screen until they hit the note with the monkey. When the note is hit, the note sounds. The student must identify the note, at which point the entire class must sing the note. When this is done, a new note appears, and student begins the process of tracking the new note. The other element to the game is a floating obstacle that weaves its way around the screen, settling into different spots after a note has been completed. The students must avoid the obstacle, but the worst that happens is the sounding of a series of discordant notes if the child hits it. The idea of a winner and a loser is rather amorphous here.

Snap Shots:

This is the interface	The player sitts on the wheelchair and controls the animation character.	This is our game's main character " Music Monkey"	The wheelchair of the player

Diagram:

User Testing:
First testing: 04/15/05 in ITP. Two Occupational Therapists came to our school and joined our testing.
Second testing : 04/22/04

Feed Back:
The first feedback is primarily about the controling of wheelchair. First, children in the school are not allowed to driving their wheelchair backward for the safety reason. Second, the speed of this game is too slow which might not interest children. (After the second round testing, we realized that they are absolutely right.)

The children gave us all of the feedback we could have ever hoped for with this prototype:
-The fourth grade students loved the play of the game, but then again, the group we tested with was particularly fun-loving. They loved moving their chairs in the space, and they loved the monkey. They loved the glow sticks, and they enjoyed the game. The game itself was marginal, however, as it was the movement and control of the character they loved more than anything.
-The seventh grade group reacted as I expected: they hated it. More appropriately, they thought it was useless to them. The game was too easy for them, and the monkey a bit too childish to be appealing. They did, however, provide a good bit of feedback. They wanted something they could relate to. They also wanted this to be done in a bigger space. They wanted to move faster and have more control over the character than being limited simply to a small screen and game play area.

Notes for future development:

1. Music monkey is so far a two-player game. But in each class there are around 8-12 children. So how to have more children play the game at the same time is the next step that I'd love to take.
2. There is not so much collaberative work between players during the game. I guess the future game could be like: children can play different music instruments by moving their wheelchairs into
different areas of the classroom. By this way, more children can be involved into this game and play a collaberative game.
3. Didn't work very closely with occupational therapists.(They are the people who migh affect the school to hire us to keep working on this project). Miss another a group of users.

Technical Notes:

We use one web camera as the sensor to detect the position of children's wheelchair in the space. The camera has a wide angle lens by which it can cover larger space. The data of position of the wheelchair will be processed by the computer and then direct the movement of the animation character (monkey) on the screen. Children are encouraged to reach the music notes on the screen by moving their wheelchairs. Once they finish reaching all the notes, a song composed by all those notes will be played.