"Badass Biking" was a group project done during my exchange programme in the Netherlands, at Saxion University of Applied Sciences. The briefing was to create a game with educational purpose adressing the traffic safety issue. We decided to approach it focusing on a very important factor for Netherlands' urban traffic: the bikers, and even more pressing, their early education. 

In the Netherlands kids around 10 years old do a written exam about traffic rules while biking, so we decided to complete the experience with a more imersive test, putting them closest to the real situations and actually observing their responses. To achieve it we chose to use a bicicle as the game controller thus having to create all the adaptations needed to input the data from the cicling to the game.

The interaction was mediated by an Arduino board, that received the input from 2 different sensors, as you can see on the video below, and this data was sent to our Flash game. The video depicts how the variations were interpreted by the game and we were very happy with the first tests results.

Meanwhile and after setting that it was possible to make such game we developed the game to finally test it with a boy belonging to our target audience and we achieved a final result that was not only educational but entertaining for the players.

 

Delivering this experience to kids helps them to absorb and create the intentioned and necessary reflexes for a safe biking around traffic and other elements of the urban scenario, putting to practice the rules they only hear and read about.

 

Personally it was a great experience for me since it was my first and most rewarding project during my exchange program, I could learn a lot from the other members experiences, from methods to technical detailing, so I could acquire some knowledge of every part involved in the project. Also the good humor of the whole group contributed to an excelent work environment. Below you can see the final result of our project, enjoy!