The final assignment in our Building Virtual Worlds class was lovingly dubbed “The Kobayashi Maru,” after the no-win test Spock creates and Kirk cheats in Star Trek.
We were given five weeks to design a student installation for the 2010 Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition, or CODE Live, which had leased our school’s warehouse for the Olympic month.
We began with two weeks for student pitches that had to meet CODE’s ideals, which were to promote creativity, connectivity and collaboration.
From there, three weeks remained from bringing three winning proposals from paper to physical form, to a level presentable to a global audience.
I was assigned to the team that pitched the Collaborative Hallway Lit-Obstacle Experiment, or CHLOE.
CHLOE consists of 12 square pads placed in a 3×4 pattern down a hallway, so that anyone crossing can’t help but walk over. When a person walks over one of its tiles, a score projected on the wall rises by one.
Every 15 seconds, five of the 12 squares flash an LED-lit “X”. If someone steps on one of these, a “Game Over” animation flashes on the screen and the cumulative score resets to zero.
The idea is for people to become unwitting participants in a giant social video game. Would they know to avoid the X’s? Would they intentionally step on them?
We set up this experiment by connecting the floor tiles to an Arduino microprocessor, which led via USB to a laptop running five different Flash animations. These Flash animations represented five different video games – i.e. the user sorts recyclable items into bins, shoots alien spaceships, etc.
You can read more about CHLOE, the proposal and production process, over at Jeunessa Cheng’s site here.
Our group of 11 split into Programming, Flash and Construction teams. On the Construction team, I was responsible for the physical construction of CHLOE’s plywood frame, the physical functionality of switches, and placement of computer, projector and motion sensors.
This included working with the programming team to create and finalize an accurate blueprint for our floor tiles and frame, researching materials to determine polycarbonate sheets and plywood were our best resource, working with professionals to bring the material to specification, assembling the floor tiles with sensors and LED strips, and finally painting, finishing and placing the installation in the hallway.
The goal of this project, I ultimately learned, was for our instructors to see how we fared in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. The three final projects chosen were all incredibly ambitious and it led to a lot of unrest when we all thought it impossible.
What saved us was Design Thinking.
We all got together in a classroom next to a wall. Working silently, we all wrote on sticky notes every little task that had to be accomplished for CHLOE to work, from soldering sensors to painting ramps. When we were satisfied, we each took ownership of the tasks by placing these notes near our names. We then took each of our notes and broke them down into our schedule, giving each one of us a mini-milestone to deliver. Then it just became about what each team member had to do on that given day, so that no other teammate fell behind.
So I learned that by breaking a tough assignment up into manageable chunks, you can engage everybody on your team, meet your deadline and maintain morale. It was so incredibly rewarding to be able to deliver a working product on time.
I also became aware of how much I could accomplish if I just jumped in headfirst and trusted my team.
Nick Lewis, Jeunessa Cheng, Ryleigh Kostash, Derek Zhao, Anshul Goyal, Alice Tai, Xiaorui Li, Sonu Sharma, Sagar Datta, Carmen Chow and Milim Kim.
Flash, Arduino microprocessor, sensors, a table saw, a handsaw, a drill and lots of paintbrushes…