Bear Box

The original bear box
It is a peaceful day and a careless camper kindly left their food out for you

Inspiration

Who is included in the "social"? This is a question we spent a lot of time pondering this weekend. This year's theme posited the challenge to design an impactful product that positively influences how we interact with our surroundings and we wanted to make sure we looked beyond the Anthropocene into a more inclusive vision of the social. As such, we focused first and foremost on learning about how other forms of life are affected in our environments.

Environmental design was high on our brainstorming list. Originally we were looking into recycling and waste disposal around themes of climate change, but we pivoted toward a more tangible vision that could actualize movement to broaden the "social" instead of simply securing it for humanity and humanity alone. National parks epitomize the human ideal of the environment so to focus on how the negative impact of human contact manifests itself, even in those spaces, made sense. Bears represent an accessible starting point to begin these conversations and being of personal interest to our team, they became our focus.

What it does

BearBox is an educational game that teaches users about the importance of proper food storage by putting the power of a bear directly in the palm of users and having them tear into improperly designed food storage systems, plundering the contents as they progress.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several technical challenges given this was the first time the majority of our group members worked in the pygame environment. At the most basic level we got great assistance from the mentors in learning how to navigate file structures in Visual Studio after being unable to open assets. At a more robust level, a major goal of our was implementing the four actions bear-resistant containers must resist when being industry-certified: clawing, bouncing, pouncing, and rolling. Because we chose to separate the elements of the container to demonstrate their relative resistance, we were forced to develop a system that would link them to the parent object when rotating, bouncing, and generally moving around. This took a considerable amount of development time as we ran into optimization issues with pygame and experimented with elements flying all over the screen. The timer function gave us some trouble because the inconsistency in Python performance began to affect the tick speed, but this was a blessing in disguise, and forced us to optimize the rest of our code. By persisting we were able to root out every error we came across such as corrupted sRGB chunks from improper file compatibility conversion with only a little bit of frustration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The challenges we faced were not insurmountable, however. By properly scoping the project to experiment with new concepts while maintaining a familiar environment, we were able to deliver a working and playable product.

Throughout the Hackathon we made sure to connect with other groups, participating in over an hour of Capture the Flag and sitting down to eat the collective meals with other groups, conversing about each other's projects, and discussing what we hope to do as we go forward. The social in social good comes not from any one project at this event, but from building the community necessary to actualize the lessons we learn.

We are most proud of the journey we took to get here, our group met for the first time at the team forming meeting after the opening ceremony and made the absolute most of our experience, learning more than we ever could have imagined, cramming nearly a semesters worth of education into a short 36 hours.

What we learned

EVERYTHING!!!! One of our team members came into this project with only a cursory knowledge of how to define a class and another came in having never front-ended Python. We left knowing how to create and debug a game, scale windows, rotate objects relative to each other, track assets, and implement global systems. Furthermore, we learned how to create and edit vector graphs in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, two platforms we had never used before. To top it all off we now have a detailed knowledge of sRGB color space compatibility!

But most importantly - we learned about how awesome bears are and the importance of protecting them from our food. Bears become dependent on and dangerous to humans and then have to be either put down or get a second life testing bear-resistant containers like BearBox! To be rated bear-resistant, containers have to be able to withstand over an hour of continuous pen-testing!

What's next for BearBox

THE MOON! (Not actually, there are no bears up there). BearBox is a concept for a full-fledged product testing physics simulator, where containers can be built and tested using different materials and item types. As a game, users get to see directly what works and what doesn't in food storage by manipulating every element single of the box. A sturdy container is only as good as its weakest latch and the applications go far beyond the outdoors: is a bungee cord enough to keep out the alleyway raccoon? There is only one way to find out. A currency and strength system will add a forced choice that balances and gamifies the experience. We envision this as a critical piece of the national parks education tool kit, putting the power of a bear directly in the palm of users will make them acutely aware of how impactful their actions can be, and the terrible consequences if they don't act.