Practical 4: Maze Runner

Why did we choose 'Maze Runner' ?

1. Psychological Effect

After some research on what children would like to play in a carnival or arcade, we found out that games that require trail and error has the highest popularity. Games such as maze applies principles of psychology operant conditioning with partial reinforcement, Operant conditioning is a method of learning that employs rewards and punishments for behavior and with partial reinforcement is reinforcing the player only sometimes and not everytime the desired behavior ( Putting coin into coin-machine) occurs.

The challenge in maze runner is the time given to solve the maze, everytime the player fails he experience a punishment and each time the player is closer to solving the maze they will get a reward the sense of 'almost winning', the player will continue to try and try and try till he successfully wins. By applying this principle it is more likely to earn larger of coins compared to games like 'pick a duck' or 'Balloon pop'.

2. Minimalistic approach

Given only 2 hours to build from scratch the idea should not be overly complex, we decide to make a rotatable disc connected by a satay stick pivoting on a stand/support. There are also two holes for the start and end point these holes lead to "pockets".

1st Product Sketch: Stand/Support with rotating sticks

Front view Back / Inside view

Disc and stand measurement sketch

3D Model

Choosing maze design and difficulty

We chose Level 3 because our audience is children and it should be moderately challenging, if level 4 was chosen it might turn off some children due to it being so complex and also the more complex the design is the smaller the cardboard measurement must be. Smaller parts are harder to cut and can go missing easily, If Level 1 or 2 was chosen it may take only 1 try to complete the maze and our psychological method cannot be applied.

Below shows the measurement our member have finalise to fit our disc perfectly

to familiarise ourselves with making it, the day before making our member tried making it himself and it turned out great.

D-DAY

The practical went really smooth and everyone are well aware of their individual tasks

Work division:

Samuel- Main (square) base

Main circle base

Pedro- Gusset (4 piece) and rectangle plates for maze

Zhi Ying- Maze

Vivian- Blog and video advertisement for costumer

Unfortunely, due to a quarantine order I was not able to join the team in making the maze runner but I am glad I was still able to do my part in writing this blog and the editing of our video advertisement for our audience. The team was very organised they really followed a quote by Mr Ting to do more and talk less.

Final product

Final product video presentation:

We really enjoyed making it and we hope our audience will be excited to try out our product ! If we could make any changes to our product we would make it more creative and colourful.

Blogged by:

Vivian Teo