The Zoommings

The Zoommings is an open-ended interactive physical game with robots. Aiming at fostering children’s understanding of dynamic systems in a playful and embodied way, this game pursues the work of Seymour Papert (the turtle/LOGO). The Zoommings are cute and clumsy little robots. The game relies on a swarm user interface made of independent self-propelled elements that move collectively and react to users' inputs. Inspired from the Lemmings gameplay, our first prototype invites children to resolve situations by changing a Zooming's individual behavior and to anticipate how this will affect the system.

Publication

Revisiting Turtles and Termites: An Open-ended Interactive Physical Game with Multiple Robots
Pauline Gourlet, Mathieu Le Goc, and Sean Follmer. 2017. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 679-682.