Role-play
Fictional residents let children consider needs outside their own.
Building for others
Physical making turns care into concrete placement decisions.
Shared negotiation
Group play creates discussion around tradeoffs, access, and community needs.
Early research mapped developmental needs, empathy activities, and public-space play opportunities.
Precedents like LEGO showed how block-based play can support active making, collaboration, and open-ended problem-solving.
Research Takeaway
Children learn social concepts more naturally through role-play, building, and negotiation than through direct instruction.
Design Implication
Make empathy something children can physically build, revise, and discuss together.
Perspective Taking - Residents have different needs and constraints
Agency - children make visible choices that affect the world
Collaboration - multiple players build, negotiate, and revise together
Physical Play - blocks create an intuitive, hands-on interaction
Open-Ended Problem Solving - there is no single correct solution
How The Game Works
“Place a hospital near the senior center.”
“The repair crew needs a power station nearby.”
“This apartment should be one floor so older residents can get in.”
Block prototypes tested grip, stackability, facade variation, and contact placement.
Before building the sensing system, we tested the physical play format with cardboard boards, rough building pieces, and sample prompts. We wanted to understand how players gathered around the board, how large the pieces needed to be, and whether the prompts created natural discussion.
Early mockups helped us test board scale, group access, and how players gathered around the city.
The tests showed that the physical format mattered as much as the story. Board shape affected group access, prompts helped players negotiate placement, and block details like rounded edges, grooves, facades, and stackability made the pieces feel more like toys.
I led the hardware and tangible interaction side of the project. My work focused on turning the gameplay concept into a physical-digital system: passive sensing blocks, board detection zones, Arduino logic, block prototyping, and fabrication.
Core Challenge
Make the interaction feel simple for children while hiding a reliable sensing system underneath.
The blocks had to work as both toys and circuit components. If they felt fun but didn’t make consistent contact, the interaction broke. If they sensed correctly but felt fragile or awkward, the play broke.
System Solution: Physical Blocks as Digital Signals
Blocks use passive components, resistors and copper tape, to be uniquely identified via analog signals.
To connect the physical game to the projected world, I developed a sensing concept using passive resistor-coded blocks. Each building block contained a resistor and copper tape contacts. When placed on the board, the block completed a circuit and produced a unique analog value that could be mapped to a building type.
1. Physical block is placed on game board
2. Copper tape on block completes circuit on board
3. Embedded resistor creates unique analog signal
4. Multiplexer polls board zones to determine block location
5. Arduino maps reading to building ID
6. Unity receives data (block location and type)
7. Projected city updates
Passive Electronics
A key design decision was keeping the blocks passive. The blocks have no batteries, microcontrollers, or powered electronics inside. That makes them cheaper, safer, more durable, and easier for children to handle.
I built the board as a layered system: a visible road/play surface, a detection layer with copper contact zones, and an electronics base for wiring, multiplexers, and Arduino hardware.
Prototyped building blocks and accessories were refined for grip, stackability, and consistent electrical contact.
I also prototyped the building blocks in SolidWorks, adjusting their geometry for grip, stackability, facade variation, and electrical contact. Through testing, I adjusted copper tape placement, widened resistor spacing, added small lips to improve contact pressure, rebuilt loose connections, and tested zones modularly before integrating them into the full board.
The biggest technical lesson was that the sensing system was not only an electronics problem. It was also a mechanical design problem. A circuit could work cleanly on a breadboard and still become unreliable inside a physical play object because of contact alignment, pressure, wire strain, and analog threshold variation.
Custom Arduino + MUX system polls all zones and transmits unique analog profiles to Unity in real time.
Results
Final Prototype Included:
Fabricated physical board
3D-printed building blocks & accessories
Storylines and character prompts
Projected city visuals
Modular Arduino sensing tests
Wizard-of-Oz feedback moments for demo fidelity
What Worked:
City-building made empathy spatial
Prompts created discussion
Physical blocks encouraged collaboration
Modular sensing tests proved the direction
What To Improve:
Contact alignment
Pressure consistency
Loose wiring
Analog threshold spacing
Full-board integration reliability
My Impact:
The concept went from a game idea to a tangible physical-digital prototype
The team had a working hardware direction for passive block detection.
The fabricated board and block system made the interaction understandable in demo form.
Testing exposed the next engineering priorities: contact reliability, stronger registration, cleaner wiring, and full Arduino-to-Unity integration.
Full Demo Video
Players place physical buildings on a shared board, respond to character prompts, and shape a projected city together through spatial choices.
Final Prototype Status
OurCity taught me that physical-digital interaction depends on both the big concept and the tiny mechanical details. The concept worked because city-building gave children a playful reason to consider other people’s needs. The hardware challenge came down to pressure, alignment, tolerances, wiring, and calibration.
This project clarified the kind of work I want to keep doing: building playful physical systems where engineering, storytelling, and human experience all have to work together.
Reflection
OurCity was a great exercise in creating physical-digital interactions from research, to concept, to demo day. I loved learning specifically about games and gameplay, how design decisions can impact children and how they play, and what they can take away from it. This idea, city-building for kids, worked because it gave children a playful reason to consider other people’s needs. It also was fun to integrate interesting technologies and work through the challenges that come with it: pressure, alignment, tolerances, wiring, and calibration.
This project validated that this is the kind of work I want to do: building playful physical systems where engineering, storytelling, and human experience come together.
