missimo | blink:IO

Project Introduction

missimo is a project for children aged eight to ten that offers educational yet fun experiments on such as AI, robotics, and programming. The special appeal: missimo visits primary schools in Austria’s rural areas by a custom-designed truck. These places are the furthest away from technical museums and other STEM learning experiences.

In 2018, the Kaiserschild-Stiftung, a charitable private foundation, approached the Ars Electronica Futurelab to support the realization of their goal: to offer primary school children in rural areas of Austria a hands-on learning experience on STE(A)M topics – science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Their idea of developing a mobile learning and dissemination concept for primary schools resulted in missimo: Deine Mission Morgen (Your mission tomorrow).

The truck is composed of two levels, hosting several stations. The one I conceived and mainly produced is blink:io.

Highlight: blink:io

blink:io is a project to create a novel hardware-augmented puzzle platformer video-game, in the field of primary school (8-11 y/o) education, which aims to teach concepts of electricity. Additionally, requirements included the need for it to work in a truck being transported from school to school several times a week, with full classrooms coming in and experiencing it. This research project was conducted around five threads:

1. integrating a physics-based electronic circuit solver (SPICE-based) into existing video-game technologies (Unity / C#)
2. create a system where cables plugged in and out by participants (children) can be used as an input and feedback (through embedded lights) for a computer-based interactive experience, while resistant to mishandling and whose plugs are radially symmetrical
3. combining aforementioned user cabling with other hybrid electrical objects as elements of video-game-based puzzles based on electrical rules, using physics-based solvers integrated with game content.
4. In addition, another thread was pursued in creating an automatic independent calibration system to allow for quick & quality calibration of a retro-projector onto a surface to compensate potential offsetting from daily vibrations of varying amplitude and frequencies (on the road).