Friday marked the end of Dinosaur Camp – our week-long activities designing and building a location-based game that would allow school children to locate and then dig up a dinosaur skeleton (virtually). Featuring the Colossal Fossilator and the Skelly Telly, we were able to demonstrate some of the principles of the game at “The Big Idea – Creating Creativity” at Varndean School on Friday.
Detecto-o-saurus has a number of similarities with our existing Invisible Buildings game but instead of digging up a Roman Villa, you dig up, er … a dinosaur. The method of detection is rather different requiring the user to drill samples at various locations (using the Colossal Fossilator) and look at the age of the fossils discovered.
From correlating the ages and depths at which these are found, they can then set the depth at which the Skelly Telly should look for the dinosaur bones. Then having found a skeleton they must work out how to extract it. They can use a variety of methods from gentle brushing and clearing away the soil to dynamiting. But beware if you get it wrong!
Tale the bones back to the lab to reconstruct how your dinosaur may have looked – is it a Stegosaurus or is it a chicken?
Thanks to Claire Hall who was helping all last week. Claire is an MA student at Brunel University and won a prize to work at LocoMatrix for a week following a talk by Richard Vahrman and her submission of a poster describing how the game might work.
