Cardboard Wipeout

to watchet, for the first of my two workshops getting teenagers to do creative-tech stuff. twee for me, but west somerset has the lowest social mobility in the whole of the UK and watchet is the most deprived ward in the district. so kinda serious.

the brief was gaming, and one idea led to wipeout-with-cardboard. one shipping container, two dirt-cheap radio-controlled cars and a village’s worth of post-christmas cardboard later, we had a track. admittedly more cardboard than tech at the moment, but this route is surely more engaging than coding 101.

aaaand… wipeout? i challenge anyone to find a better cultural artefact from 1996 than the opening sequence of wipeout 2097: the designers republic, future sound of london, it’s a coming together of all the arts.

with the track made, time to add the digital magic and make it a game.

first up: LED strips with an extra wire… a programmable wire. and here is a micro:bit, essentially the guts of a phone made so we can control and play with things. with a bit of drag-and-drop in a web browser, we can make patterns down the strip and animate them.

but we need two strips, with a controller each, to go round our track. so how to animate them together? the micro:bit has radio, they can talk to each other and say “now!”. this is also how we’re going to make the whole game work, with more of these boards talking to each other.

photo credit: jon @ contains art

lights programmed with a countdown and chase animation i’d made the day before, onto the next task: fit them round the track.

track hacked, onto task three: the car.

with micro:bit in there, parasitising it’s power off two of the three car batteries, we could disable the motor until the go! of the countdown, have different team logos lit up on the roof, send accellerometer data back to a computer to make futuristic driving sounds… or, most simply, give us a button to start the countdown. feels right having it on the car.

with the limited time, this is actually one i made earlier; the removable roof and fit of the micro:bit was a bit of a gift. within the workshop, we experimented with fitting cameras to the back-up car…

so how does it look? and how does it look with a computer-driving-game first-person-view!? could you stream that camera feed to a phone hanging in front of someone’s eyes?

now i know that wifi streaming from a go-pro isn’t going have the low-latency required for actually driving it, but that’s just a spur to research what might… fpv racing drones seems to have this solved.

bonus: this photo was taken by one of the teenagers. it’s a great one.

the brief was computer game. so, let’s make this thing an immersive experience. you enter the container, the ‘press play to start’ message is flashing, music booming…

with a micro:bit – and it’s radio-link to the track and car – connected to a laptop, a quick bit of patching i’d done the day before got some videos and coundown sounds playing in response to the “wait, 3, 2, 1, start, finish, wait” coming down the USB cable. add projector and PA, and boom!

we’d done it. ten teenagers, ten hours. quite the achievement, and time enough to play with it!

…and did i have fun? sheesh!

photo credit: jon @ contains art

i went to dorkbot bristol, and good things happened. one of which came from a producer from the watershed’s pervasive media studio standing up and saying “does anyone have a creative tech workshop? i’m looking to do something with families this easter.”

i do, said so, and lo: here i am hacking a fresh set of argos’s finest cheapest radio control cars. two notches later, it’s as if the designers of the toy meant for the micro:bit board to go here.

the only problem is that staff at watershed figured that while wipeout might be where the idea of the workshop came from, mario kart was the better hook to sell the idea to the public. they are of course right, and from the point of view of the workshop, they are identical games: tracks with power ups and downs.

when i dreamt up cardboard wipeout, it was for a two-day, 10 hour slot. it was appropriate to go “here’s your empty shipping container, let’s figure out how to fill it”. but a three-hour workshop is quite different, and so: blank canvas, like before? or… and if “or”, then what? the decision was to prime the space with a section of track: a figure-of-eight is a classic use of limited space, it gets you a bridge, it makes you consider how walls might work, and is a good demo for efficient use of a cardboard box. well, three. quite elegant, i think.

micro:bits come loaded with a demo program that’s great for taking them out of their retail box, plugging in a battery and passing them around the group.

but later, in smaller break-out sessions, the question becomes: we’ve seen what the people who make these boards make it do, but that’s not what we need for our game. how do we make it do what we want it to do.

this 8-14 year old workshop skewed younger both days, so a lot of the wonder was the kids simply selecting an icon in scratch on my computer, and then seeing that light up on the board’s 5x5 LED matrix.

but also, like here, sometimes the wonder was seeing something i’d prepared earlier, and grokking a piece of the “grown up” code that animated the LED strips.

original photo credit: shamil ahmed

making the micro:bits do what we wanted was half of the “creative tech”, as they need to be part of our physical game. and with me, “let’s hook them up to the track” quickly turns to some fetishising the clicks of different switches. any excuse to quote kenneth grange’s small pleasures.

original photo credit: shamil ahmed

the three-hour format was to run twice. and here’s the first day’s lot, racing their track.

(well, half of them are out of shot, but you get the idea)

original photo credit: shamil ahmed

and here’s the second day’s lot, making their track. so different!

having named one of the group challenges as “the banana” – after mario kart’s well-known banana that can spin you out – it was a happy moment to see tbe carboard + microswitch engineering had been appropriately set-dressed.

thanks to tony for making this happen, and ably facilitating on both days. amazing feedback from the families throughout, to the point of asking if i could do it in their schools. i’ll take that as a win, and… yes, maybe?

love the championship cup that came out of the first day. that’s either a very canny child, or the hand of a parent to e.g. find that dragon on some cardboard and line it up behind.

tony, the producer, kept the track up for the next day’s monthly first friday networking drinks. that gave me a chance to try my my kids’ rc car, which was… quite something. suffice to say, the £75 UDIRC car demolishes the track, scrambling up the slopes and jumping clear off the bridge. i reckon we could do a loop-the-loop with it.

martin had also worked a little magic, digging out some stage lights and delivering on our parting conversation from the day before:

toby – “the gopro camera will stream over wifi, but the latency is too slow to drive the car using it. the fpv drone racers must have a modern solution for this, but back in the day, those lipstick analogue spy cams would be perfect for this”
martin – “hmm… i wonder… let me go rummage”

given the opportunity had come about via dorkbot, only felt right to present back what i’d been up to. a good “who is this toby”, as much as anything else.