‘Kids will play the game we invented’

How do you motivate teenagers to be more physically active in school? Olena Chashchina and Tim Heubner, third year students Sensor Technology, developed a game that gets everyone moving.

Olena: ‘Every semester, we get assigned a large project. During the third semester of your third year, the projects are real, coming from actual clients. Our group, consisting of Tim, me and two other classmates, got assigned a project from the Health and Physical Education Center of the Hanze UAS.’

Tim: ‘Our client wanted us to come up with a solution to improve the motor skills of high school children. There were a few requirements: it should, of course, get children moving, be fun to play and shouldn’t cause too much chaos in the classroom. Also, it should be something that would fit in a corner of the classroom and not have a score board, so that the less confident students would also be inclined to play.’

Olena: ‘We started out by doing research on motor skills and fairly soon came up with the idea we actually pursued: we created a wooden board with about 24 buttons on it. The buttons all have LED lights on them, lighting up one by one. The player is challenged to push the buttons that light up as fast as they can. We also included a multiplayer option that divides the board into half, giving each player 12 buttons to play with.’

Tim: ‘This project certainly was challenging at times. We had to satisfy the needs of both our client and our lecturer. Moreover, we challenged ourselves to make something that would look nice as well. But in the end, it all worked out. We got a good grade and our client was very happy with the result. It’s really fun and rewarding to build something that will actually get used. Realising that our invention is going to be in various classrooms and kids will be playing with it, makes me somewhat proud of this project.’