Final Project Essay, Zhenming Wang, Professor Young

We decided to give our project the name ‘E-Maze’, an interactive device integrated Arduino and Processing. We get the inspiration from an Iphone game called ‘Amaze’, in which the player need to control a ball to go through a 2D maze, with barriers restrict its path, as the ball going with the player dragging it, it colors those paths that it passed, and the player cannot win until the ball have passed every path in the maze. Similarly, we decide to make a game, using Arduino andProcessing to achieve similar outcomes. 

The challenge of our project is that, we are going to define that the player, while controling the ball, they cannot stop the ball until it hits the the nearest barriers, in case of cheating, meanwhile they have to control the ball to go over every squares of the paths in the maze to finish the game, which is a challenge for them in controlling through Arduino, also a challenge for us to achieve such functions through coding. This project, we believe is quite appealing to most audiences, since there would be color printing the path as the ball moving on, meanwhile in our further consideration, there would be different level, dividing by the difficulty of the map. There could be a timing function, the player will all get a first map of the same difficulty, and they could be assigned to different maps as they finished the first task in different times. This could make the game more colorful and provide the palyer with more challenges. 

According to our plan, we are going to finish the coding part approximately by next weekend, which means we could get more time to run and test it afterwards. Meanwhile, we also need to use 3D printing to make an action bar to control the ball to go. These would approxiamtely take us 2 weeks. 

As I mentioned before in the research essay, my definition of interctive project has been updated, influenced by some works made by artists. I now believe that interctive projects also need to have a sense of beauty, which could provide the users with a sense of joy. As a response to that, the color producing as the ball passing its way, is a way of reflecting our understanding of interactive. It not only color the work, also give the player a sense of fulfillment and joy. 

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