The Hangman Game
- Enhance the distributed nature of these games
- Opportunity for multiplayer games
- Close to traditional nature of the game but even more enhanced
- Provide both tangibility and fun with mind’s sharpness enhancement to children
PACT Analysis
People: Possible people involved are children, their parents and other adults such as teachers. The group of children is the most important as the children are the direct users of this prototype and constitute also a very sensitive part of human population.
Their needs and perception is different from adults’. Special attention should be given to children with special capabilities or disabilities. Prototype should be as simple as possible to be manipulated easily by all children. It should not have complex procedures.
Clear actions for playing. Great the importance of security and safety for the children. The components of the prototype should definitely not harm in general people and more specially children. And this is because usually children tend to be more vulnerable in accident and are not that careful. Moreover, there should be maybe some flexibility in the use of pins and this is because kids usually tend to lose pieces of their games.
Activities: The scope of Hangman game is to make children and not only to have fun and develop the sharpness of their mind. The whole process of playing it should be quite simple. Kids should use the different pins to construct a hidden word and then will use again the pins to guess words. So, the whole process involves mainly three different activities: the first is to construct the hidden word, the second, which is an iterative one, is to make several attempts to guess the right letters and find the hidden word and finally the third, again an iterative one, is to build the Hangman.
The pins have to just be placed/replaced on the Fabric as well as be removed when necessary. The activities performed need cooperation as they involve more than one player (actually two). The players do not need to enter by hand a specific type of data as this is performed somehow automatically with the choice of the Pins that they decide to place on the Fabric. Each of the Pins should represent a specific data which should be “processed” by the Fabric.
Contexts: The activityof playing the Hangman Game it could happen everywhere, either indoors or outdoors. The prototype should be quite safe and resistant to several “dangerous” circumstances such as accidents occurrence (water/dust resistant). The Pins should be “programmed” in a quite flexible way so as to be somehow able to be recovered missed pieces/pins. Fabric is itself quite strong and not that vulnerable to misuse. Pins should not harm children.
Technologies: The data that has to be input is not that difficult because it does not involve typing something. It just operates with the placement of Pins on the Fabric. However, the way that pins have to be placed needs to be quite clear. The output also is easily to be interpreted as both visual and acoustic ways are used to indicate this.
These follow the “usual” and “internationally” accepted ways to interpret the success and failure. The system should make explicitly clear when a word or letter is found successfully or not. The system should be able to operate somehow in two modes: one for the hidden word setting and another for the actual search for the hidden word. The separation of the modes should be made clear each time and there should be no chances of misunderstanding. In case the latter happens, the system should be able to “show” to the users in which mode it is.