Little Owl Construction Co.
Little Owl Construction Co. is a five-person team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. The team is working with ETC Outreach, Extension, and Engagement to build a prototype of a physical interactive platform in collaboration with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania to get middle-schoolers interested in higher education in the entertainment technology industry.
By leveraging the design methodologies and team-based learning used at the ETC as inspiration, they aim to create an experience where children can take on interdisciplinary roles and tell a story collaboratively using creative technology.
Boys & Girls Club
The Boys & Girls Club is a national organization of local chapters which provide voluntary after-school programs for young people. Their mission is to enable all young people to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens. Their vision is to provide a world-class Club Experience that assures success is within reach of every young person who enters their doors, with all members on track to graduate from high school with a plan for the future, demonstrating good character and citizenship, and living a healthy lifestyle.
Our Platform
Our platform allows middle schoolers to collaboratively create an animatronic performance. They get to try their hand at different disciplines by using our different stations: story, backdrop, movement, sound, and lighting.
Story Station: Guests work together and use word tiles to fill in the blanks in our story prompt. They take this story to the next stations to create their animatronic performance.
Movement Station: Guests program the movement of the animatronic using code blocks.
Backdrop Station: Guests create the art that goes behind the animatronic using a drawing tablet. They can either draw freehand or utilize our coloring-book-style backdrops or our sticker assets.
Sound Station: Guests can access our sound library to add sound effects to each line of their code. They can also pick background music and ambient tracks.
Lighting Station: Guests can design the lighting of the performance by choosing the RGB values of the lights.