Multidisciplinary Art and Engineering Collaboration in the Design of “Bee My Guide: An Interactive Journey Back Home”

Mary Ann Weitnauer; Jacqueline Rohde; Timothy Brothers; Martta Sareva

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Multidisciplinary Engineering Division (MULTI) Technical Session 9
Tagged Division: Multidisciplinary Engineering Division (MULTI)
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/47786

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Paper Authors

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Mary Ann Weitnauer Georgia Institute of Technology

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Mary Ann Weitnauer (formerly Mary Ann Ingram) is currently a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Georgia Tech, where she joined as an assistant professor in 1989. She was a visiting professor at Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark during the summers of 2006 to 2008 and at Idaho National Labs in 2010. She held the Georgia Tech ADVANCE Professorship with the College of Engineering from 2006 to 2012, where she was responsible for initiatives to help the female faculty of the college succeed. She was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing from 2009 to 2012. She was the Senior Associate Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2016-2021, where she was responsible for academic operations. Prof. Weitnauer’s research focus is currently split between MIMO wireless communications and sensor-driven, marker-less, interactive and immersive digital art. She leads the Electronic ARTrium laboratory, which she established in 2021.

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Jacqueline Rohde Georgia Institute of Technology

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Jacqueline (Jacki) Rohde is the Assessment Coordinator in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her interests are in sociocultural norms in engineering and the professional development of engineering students.

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Timothy Brothers Georgia Institute of Technology

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Prof. Tim Brothers has been a Professor of the Practice with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Institute of Technology since Fall of 2020 and has focused on explorative learning at both university level and primary school level. Prof. Brothers’ research includes real-time signal processing in the areas of communications, RF signal processing, image processing, and sensor fusion. Prior to joining GaTech, Dr. Brothers worked on research, development, and test of advanced sensor systems for multiple companies since 2007.

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Martta Sareva Hope-Hill Elementary School

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Martta Sareva is a visual arts educator at Hope-Hill Elementary School.

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Abstract

Bee My Guide: An Interactive Journey Back Home (BMG) is human-sized video game with mechatronics, being developed by senior capstone design students, Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) students, high school students, elementary school students, and a professional composer, to be shown to the public in November 2024. The project involves students majoring in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial design, mechanical engineering, and computational media. Camera-based computer vision software recognizes the pose of the player. The player’s pose controls the game and changes the displayed video, mechatronics, lighting, music, voices and sound effects. The game will be built in four separate sections. In the narrative, a bee video character has become lost because of a storm and needs the player’s help to get back to his hive. In each of the first three sections, the player is guided by an animatronic narrator and plays mini games to earn a numerical clue. In the last section, the player uses the three clues to open the hive so Mr. Bee can rejoin his family and friends. A bar code ticketing system will keep track of the player’s progress through the sections and collect player statistics. The paper will highlight some of the educational and organizational methods used in the first two semesters of the BMG project. The project began in the Spring 2023 semester, when the narrative and early prototypes were designed, and different types of hardware and software were explored for sound design, pose recognition, and the ticketing system. The paper will discuss how the narrative design process was completed in the first four weeks, including digital storytelling assignments, how the narrative was selected, and how key scenes and narrative elements were identified. Next, the paper will discuss how the VIP students were refocused on ideation and design for the various video, mechatronic, and sound components of the game. The paper will discuss how the faculty leaders of the project engaged a local elementary school over Summer 2023 with a way that the elementary students will contribute artwork that will be applied by the VIP students in the video design. The VIP enrollment doubled in the Fall 2023 semester, relative to Spring 2023. The paper will discuss how the many new students were brought up to speed quickly and gained a sense of ownership in the overall project. Then, the paper will focus on the multidisciplinary collaboration in the construction of Cappy the Caterpillar, the narrator in Section 2, and on the lip sync control of all three animatronic narrators. This work should be of interest to the multidisciplinary engineering community and the STEAM education community, in terms of resources and ideas for integrating engineering and the arts and widely disparate age groups within an experiential project-based learning context.

Citation
Format

Weitnauer, M. A., & Rohde, J., & Brothers, T., & Sareva, M. (2024, June), Multidisciplinary Art and Engineering Collaboration in the Design of “Bee My Guide: An Interactive Journey Back Home” Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47786

TY - CPAPER
AB - Bee My Guide: An Interactive Journey Back Home (BMG) is human-sized video game with mechatronics, being developed by senior capstone design students, Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) students, high school students, elementary school students, and a professional composer, to be shown to the public in November 2024. The project involves students majoring in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial design, mechanical engineering, and computational media. Camera-based computer vision software recognizes the pose of the player. The player’s pose controls the game and changes the displayed video, mechatronics, lighting, music, voices and sound effects. The game will be built in four separate sections. In the narrative, a bee video character has become lost because of a storm and needs the player’s help to get back to his hive. In each of the first three sections, the player is guided by an animatronic narrator and plays mini games to earn a numerical clue. In the last section, the player uses the three clues to open the hive so Mr. Bee can rejoin his family and friends. A bar code ticketing system will keep track of the player’s progress through the sections and collect player statistics.
The paper will highlight some of the educational and organizational methods used in the first two semesters of the BMG project. The project began in the Spring 2023 semester, when the narrative and early prototypes were designed, and different types of hardware and software were explored for sound design, pose recognition, and the ticketing system. The paper will discuss how the narrative design process was completed in the first four weeks, including digital storytelling assignments, how the narrative was selected, and how key scenes and narrative elements were identified. Next, the paper will discuss how the VIP students were refocused on ideation and design for the various video, mechatronic, and sound components of the game. The paper will discuss how the faculty leaders of the project engaged a local elementary school over Summer 2023 with a way that the elementary students will contribute artwork that will be applied by the VIP students in the video design. The VIP enrollment doubled in the Fall 2023 semester, relative to Spring 2023. The paper will discuss how the many new students were brought up to speed quickly and gained a sense of ownership in the overall project. Then, the paper will focus on the multidisciplinary collaboration in the construction of Cappy the Caterpillar, the narrator in Section 2, and on the lip sync control of all three animatronic narrators. This work should be of interest to the multidisciplinary engineering community and the STEAM education community, in terms of resources and ideas for integrating engineering and the arts and widely disparate age groups within an experiential project-based learning context.
AU - Mary Ann Weitnauer
AU - Jacqueline Rohde
AU - Timothy Brothers
AU - Martta Sareva
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Multidisciplinary Art and Engineering Collaboration in the Design of “Bee My Guide: An Interactive Journey Back Home”
UR - https://peer.asee.org/47786
ER -