RFID Children’s Game Jared Wilkin Chris Good

What does it Do? A set of stations that when deployed create an active children’s game Each station uses RFID to track the movements of the kids Uses an Ipaq as “brain” of game

Game Play This will be a game that has two teams (three or more on a side). Initially each team will register with an rfid reader so the system will know what team each child is on. There will be six (or more) stations spread out in a room each with three different colored lights. Once the game has started one of the lights at each station will light up. Each different color is worth a different number of points. A team scores by having one of its members be the first person to arrive at a station after the light has changed, and a player may not score a the same station twice. After a short time interval all of the lights change again causing the players to run to a different station. After a certain amount of time the team with the most points wins.

Who will care? Alarming trend of increasing childhood obesity Some PE classes have resorted to teaching a unit on Xbox Educators can use this to help “video game” cultured children be active. Someday extend to the home to keep kids active.

Basic Scenario Elementary PE class:  PE teacher wants to make kids be active as well as interest them by being “High Tech”  Would take a few minutes to arrange the stations  Hand out RFID tagged gloves  Set up teams  Let the fun begin

Game Setup Station IPAQ Statio n Team Reader

Architecture – Basic Components Three Stations  Central “Brain” Station  Team reader Station  Multiple Game Stations Brain Station consists of an ipaq using a compact flash card containing an embedded mote Team Reader Station will be an RFID reader (we are not yet sure if it will be long or short) connected to a mote Game Station will consist of 4 lights, a mote and a short range RFID reader

Architecture – Interaction Within a Station the RFID reader sends tag ID numbers to mote via its Serial pins All Stations communicate wirelessly using TinyOS Active Messages. The embedded mote in the flash card forwards these packets to the ipaq on its serial port

Architecture – Data Flow Initially packets containing each child’s ID are sent to Ipaq along with team information Once Start command is given, the Ipaq on regular intervals, sends packets to Game Stations telling them how to behave (which light to turn on) Game Stations send an ID number each time a child is scanned at that station.

Game Setup Station IPAQ Statio n Team Reader

Expected effort Software portion of Team Reader Station and Game Station is done Software that controls IPAQ still needs to be written All Hardware setup still needs to be Done  Switching mechanism for lights  Housing for Stations  Physical connection of mote to RFID reader

Minimum Vs. Expected One Major Design Choice was to make all the stations as Dumb as possible At minimum one game type will be implemented Hopefully it will have multiple game types that only require change (addition) to Ipaq program

Unknowns How embedded mote will communicate with program running on Ipaq? Will short range RFID readers read tags fast enough for running kids? Minor Unknown is what sort of light to use at Game Station (brightness vs power consumption)? Use of long range RFID reader?  Can scan a team in parallel instead of serially  Don’t have tags that can be read by both, so would have to preprogram in long range/short range tag pairs

Related Work Originated from Art student’s ideas, though gameplay design is original to us To our knowledge a game like this has never been done before

Burning questions Whether or not to use a long range reader? How do we communicate with the embedded mote? What sort of transistor/light combination would work best?

Evaluation How Do we evaluate our project?  In the end we want to be able to play our game  The less required set up the better  Make sure our design can be extended What performance tests are important?  Will it operate in a “real time” setting? What would you want to know from user studies?  IS IT FUN???