Pupils from Commonweal School (both mainstream and many from the Physical Impairment Unit), Crowdys Hill Special School and Lydiard Park Academy worked together on a mobile game: Binary: Decoded.
In a city of robots, where humans must scratch a living in the wastelands beyond its walls, Pye is a 14 year old experimental android who must keep her true nature a secret.
Pye spends much of her time wandering into the wastelands, searching for junk, which she brings back to her workshop to make useful devices.
The Design and Development Process
Over a series of workshops, everyone agreed that Pye would store her collected junk and make her gadgets in a Secret Workshop.
But where should it be?
It could just be an ordinary room in her home. Or it could be a secret base somewhere in the derelict part of the city.
Crowdys thought it should be a secret room in her home. They thought Androids would each have a charging pod instead of sleeping in a bed like humans. So, like people hide things under their beds, they imagined Pye would have built a secret door at the back of her charging pod, leading to her Secret Workshop.
Commonweal and Lydiard liked this idea, so Crowdys brainstormed what tools and inventions Pye might have in her Workshop and put them in a mindmap. And Commonweal and Lydiard added a few of their own.
Then began the work of designing the look of the Pye’s Workshop and the items that should be in it, remembering from the story developers that there would be a hidden object mini-game in the workshop.
Designing The Workshop
The children were supported in their art work by professional illustrator David Cousens (https://coolsurface.com). They loved working with David. It was really exciting for them to see and recognise his published work and think he was there working with them. They immensely valued the help he was able to give them in developing their illustration skills.
The story teams had come up with the idea of hidden object mini-games for represent Pye scavenging for parts for the gadget building activities. So the design teams got to work drawing items to go in Pye’s workshop for the first mini-game.
More Items
This also gave everyone the opportunity to make an individual contribution to the illustrations.
