The Idea

With the Ubi Ubi Mockup-Kit we created a “tangible” version of a digital Whack-a-mole game. By slamming your hand down on our cardboard which is equipped with Play-Doh you can get rid of your stress or other things which bother you. You can hit the Play-Doh modelling clay as hard as you want - it won't damage the system at all. With every slam which corresponds to a position of a mole on your tablet screen, you earn points. But hurry up - you only have 30 seconds to hit as many moles as you can.

Our idea helps you to relieve stress and gives you a funny, competitive game for you and your friends. With our version of the game, we bring the feeling of “slamming on something” back, like in the real game. Typical users could be fans of the original games or just people who want to play a fun game and relieve some stress.

How we did it

In the first picture, you can see our first prototype. We formed some Play-Doh balls wired them up and placed them on the cardboard. We did this to try if the connection is working. After debugging, we noticed that wires directly in the modelling clay are not very handy if we want to slam our hands down on these balls. So we added the aluminium foil underneath the play-doh and attached the wires to the conductive foil. This big part aluminium foil on the bottom you can see in the picture is our GND(Ground) area where you have to place one hand while slamming with the other one. For our next iteration, we wanted to hide all the wires to make our “device” more appealing to the eye. So we took a cardboard box and formed some aluminium foil "lollipops". With holes drilled in the box, we stuck the aluminium lollipops through the cardboard-box and attached the wires on the “stick” of the lollipop. Then we connected everything with the Ubi Ubi (a self made device similar to the Makey Makey). The device was placed underneath the box, so everything looked cleaned up. Then we formed some more Play-Doh balls and wrapped up the aluminium foil with them. The white cable coming out of the box with the aluminium foil attached is now our new GND area. Lastly, we connected the whack a mole game and voila: the game is ready to play!