Campus School Math Game
This project is a game to help students in the campus school learn to count from 1 to 9, focusing on single digits. It has large buttons to allow for students without fine motor control to be able to have a larger area to hit. It has soothing voice activation upon button press for each number, and fun but not overwhelming celebrations when the students win.
Supplies
- Platform: Adafruit Matrix Portal S3
- Display: 64×32 RGB matrix, driven via the built in adafruit matrix portal hardware on the board.
- Storage: sprites and audio on the matrix portal
- Audio: I2C audio out to amp/speaker, playing WAV files off of a DAC audio converter.
- Input: Two external buttons: Adafruit Massive Arcade Buttons
- Left button: A
- Right button: B
Laser Cut Housing and Put the Parts in Place
We cut out the housing using boxes.py with a custom size fit for this project. We assembled parts of the box to hold the buttons in place while we started to connect things up to the Matrix Portal
Connect Components to the S3
We used crimp connections to get the buttons tied to the TX and A1 pins of the S3. We also had to use a DAC audio converter to use our in-class speaker. The S3 does not have the libraries to support PWM audio, so we used a breadboard to hold the DAC and wired the speaker up to it. We used common 3v power for each component running through the breadboard. The same goes for ground, there is a common wire going from the S3 to the breadboard that each component is plugged into.
Create the Code for the Game
We coded the game to act as a way for kids at the campus school to learn how to count. It works so that you press the button on the left to pick a random number 1-9 so they can focus on just single digits. Once you get that number, you press the button on the right to count up, one at a time, to the number on the left. Each time any button is pressed it will play a sound of someone saying the correlating number for students who would benefit from that extra sensory component. Once you reach the number on the left, you get a "YOU WIN!" screen with a celebration sound effect.
Make Final Touches to the Housing and Connections
This step included soldering connections to stay in place, and adding the last pieces of the boxes.py laser cut enclosure to encase the wiring. Now the code will run and you have a great, easy, counting game to help students learn!