In this project we made a trading game that uses ultrasound to communicate messages between the players of the game. The aim was to make this game for children, so they can play it with smartwatches on their schoolyard, in order to counter loneliness among them. We tackled this by splitting up the game part and the ultrasound communication part of the project, and tried to create a working code for both, where they would work separately. In the end we managed to complete the ultrasound communication and integrate this in the game as well, but the game itself is unfortunately not playable. We can start a game, but not play it. The code we have for playing the game does not work yet, but we made a demo to still give people a visualization of how it would roughly look like and be played. The benefits here are not so much the game itself though. The project could be continued, so there is a working game, but then it would also need to be altered so it can be played on smartwatches. However, the ultrasound communication part was way more interesting and a much more useful result from this project, because that was the unique feature that defined this project. What we created could be used in many other kinds of projects, research and use cases, not just making games.
Our customer was a researcher at LIACS. None of the team members knew him beforehand, but after the first meeting, all of us knew he had a lot of knowledge on this subject. He was very engaged in the project, because he wanted to have updates regularly and responded to emails quite quickly. Every monday we met with each other to talk through the progress we made since the last meeting. One week we went to Richard’s office and the other week online via teams. This way of meeting keeps the personal connections, by not only meeting online. As a team we enjoyed working with Richard, because he was very engaged in the project. Every meeting he came up with ideas to implement in our project to further extend the goal. Besides, he also taught us how to use Scrum in this kind of project. The term Scrum was common knowledge for most of the team, but none of us ever used it in a real project.
Our team consisted of 6 members, 3 Computer Science & Economics students, 2 Computer Science students and 1 Artificial Intelligence student. This is a mixed group of teaching backgrounds, so therefore we tried to divide the work to everyone's expertise. For our project, we divided our group into 2 teams of 3, an ultrasound part and a game part. This way we could divide the work easily and conquer the project by itself. In combination with the scrum board that was created, we could divide the work and assign specific parts to each member. Furthermore we could assign them to a sprint, to see what needed to be done at which point. For every meeting we, as a group, meeted with each other to tell what everyone worked on for the past week, before we discussed it with our customer. This way we knew what everyone was up to and we would not face any problems when answering questions.