Keep’on Cooking

Inspiration

Have you ever been bored and unmotivated during work decreasing your productivity and mood? This is a common experience amongst people of all ages, and what we have found worked best was the pomodoro method. When using this method, you reward every period of work with a small break, giving you time to reset and refresh in the middle of long stretches of work. With our device it not only has the pomodoro timer, it also contains a game to look forward to every break, and the better you get at the game, the longer your breaks may become.

We also took motivation from the game Cooking Mama using relaxing cooking mini games to help calm down and reset after a stressful day, or just a fun game to look forwards to.

What it does

Our device goes under your desk and slides out when it’s time for a break, giving you a great game to play! The game incorporated makes you dodge the spilt food and try to deliver a dish in the middle of a food fight. The longer you last in the game the less times you loose and the less time that might be added to your pomodoro work time. However, if you don’t die for your whole break, you can add another 5 minutes to your next break! It’s a fun game to look forward to during your breaks motivating you to complete your work, and keeping your mood up for increased productivity.

How we built it

We spent a lot of time prototyping for the best looking and simplest design for the game we wanted to make, from the users viewing perspective and small things to make the game look more appealing and take up less space was all drawn and mapped out in our notebooks. Then we designed our very own conveyor belt system for a sleek look and a more compact design. As well as designing our own character models (after ourselves) as well as the other objects in the game, all being either hand drawn or 3d modelled and blended. Then we put everything together in a small animation of our final product, combining our conveyor belt and hand drawn backgrounds and our oven shell showing bits of its functionality and how it will look in your office space.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many technical challenges while designing our conveyer belt, due to the functionality we were trying to achieve, there were many prototypes drawn and tested before we finally came up with a design. Our design should have the ability to select exactly which obstacles we want to bring up and then close them back into the conveyer belt when the obstacle has passed our character. There were no pre-existing designs for this kind of conveyor belt (at least not that we found) so we had to completely model our own from scratch.
We also ran into a lot of trouble with different file requirements for the different programs we used, and zip files that were double zipped, as many programs have very specific file requirements or else many errors will occur. Even within the same program we had some difficulties due to different versions of the programs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did end up designing our own working conveyer belt mechanism after a lot of trials and errors and the design was thought of by our teammates within such a short time period and carried out to the best that we could. We also made a small animation of our product in the office environment and hand designed all the characters and parts of our game with original characters (being ourselves) and hand drawn details.

What we learned

We learnt about how much effort it is to make a product and how many mistakes we can run into, after fixing a component the other may stop working. We also learnt just how important proper communication was during this designation as we slowly became better listeners rather than just focusing on communicating our own ideas. Many misunderstandings arise when we think we know what the other person is talking about but we didn’t actually listen to them explain their idea fully, this causes clashes between design ideas that were later resolved after proper communication had occurred.

What's next for Keep’on Cooking?

We are working on making our machine more interactive and allowing another person to join in and have control over the obstacles that can appear. That way this game can also increase socialization within your workplace and bring a friendly yet competitive atmosphere to your team.

Built With

• blender
• canva
• ibispaintx
• onshape
• procreate
• solidworks