The Niagara Child Development Center (NCDC) has a sixteen week program for helping troubled youngsters learn to control their behavior in social situations. The program uses a driving metophor to trigger discussions that can then be applied to inappropriate social behavior. They were looking to develop some software that would bring the experience to life for their clients, and trigger more discussion than simply talking about driving.
NCDC needed an engaging interactive experience on an extremely tight budget.
We created a CD-ROM based application that would present NCDC's clients with a different mini-game each week. Some examples of the modules that we developed are:
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Module 3: Building a Car.
The user must build a car from the chassis up, choosing car parts from a garage full of gadgets. The final car is assessed for functionality, safety and speed. |
Module 8: Going to the Movies.
The user has 8 minutes to get to the theater before the movie starts. They are presented with decisions such as whether to slow down for the puddle in front of the bus stop, when to pass a slow moving vehicle, and where to park in a crowded parking lot. When they get to the theatre, they are presented with a movie detailing the effects their actions had on others. |
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Module 13: Risk Factors.
As the user drives along a snowy highway, they are asked to watch for and identify risk factors that contribute to an unsafe situation. |
Clients interact with the program for the first ten minutes of each session, then a group discussion, led by the group leader, would apply the lessons learned to real-life situations.
A variety of techniques were used to produce the final product, ranging from cartoon drawings to 3D animations. At every stage a close eye was kept on the expenditures to give the client the absolute most bang for the buck.
The STOP program was developed in the iShell Multimedia authoring environment, and delivered on CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows. A data engine was created to keep track of user progress as they interacted with the program, and record their responses to various situations. The engine tracks data for many different users at once, one many different machines, and encrypts the data using a custom encryption algorithm as it gets saved to disk.
