CMU ETC: Music in Motion

Team Skylight
Collaborators: Hwang Youn Kim, Prajwal Manjunath, Ziyu (Judy) Zhu

Timeframe: October 2014 – December 2014

Music in Motion is a game designed to help middle school students practice identifying and interpreting note symbols when positioned on a staff. The game tasks players with identifying notes that stream towards them, and matching them with their corresponding letter names. The letters appear on little monsters who eat notes that they correspond to.. For more information, please visit our website.

Roles: Creative Director, Producer, Sound Designer

 
My contributions:
– Designed game and wrote design documentation
– Project management, e.g., goal-setting, deadlines, communications (internal/external), etc.
– Directed art style
– Created cover variants of popular songs for in-game play
– Wrote and published weekly newsletters
– Created and maintained project website

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CMU ETC: Natural Rhythm

Team Skylight
Collaborators: Hwang Youn Kim, Prajwal Manjunath, Ziyu (Judy) Zhu

Timeframe: October 2014 – December 2014

Natural Rhythm is a game designed to help lower school students practice identifying the following note symbols: eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes. The game tasks each player with identifying multiple instances of these symbols and producing sounds that correspond to each note’s beat length. For more information, please visit our website.

Roles: Creative Director, Producer, Sound Designer

 
My contributions:
– Designed game and wrote design documentation
– Project management, e.g., goal-setting, deadlines, communications (internal/external), etc.
– Directed art style
– Created music for in-game play
– Wrote and published weekly newsletters
– Created and maintained project website

TF-CBT Triangle of Life: A Game to Help With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

This is an academic research paper I wrote in conjunction with Eric Chang, Seungsuk Cho, Vivek Kotecha, Bing Liu, Hannah Turner, Yan Zhang, Michael G. Christel, and Scott M. Stevens at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University. It was published in CHI PLAY ’14: Proceedings of the First ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-human Interaction in Play.

Abstract:
Under direction of medical professionals associated with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a mobile game was developed for children ages 10-12 to teach the Cognitive Triangle concept of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. This triangle is an essential component of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). A storybook experience with minigames was quickly prototyped, but first playtests showed a lack of engagement with children. The game was revised to emphasize side- scroller platform advancement where success in a level was tied intrinsically to cognitive triangle classification. Children rated the game highly across a series of playtests. The game has potential to be used by clinicians delivering TF-CBT as an appealing exercise for children.

Full paper available in Association for Computing Machinery’s Digital Library.