BT Digital Dash

APPLICATION - WUNDERMAN THOMPSON

Empowering 5 million children with new digital skills by 2025 through the BT Skills for Tomorrow initiative

Brief

BT have set themselves a target to empower 5 million children with new digital skills by 2025 through their Skills for Tomorrow initiative. To help achieve this goal, Koffeecup worked alongside Wunderman Thompson to develop the Digital Dash application - helping children improve their computational thinking via a sports themed game where the aim was to train a virtual avatar to complete a 100m sprint in the fastest possible time. The winner earned their school £10,000 in vouchers for IT equipment by competing in a live virtual final which would be broadcast on YouTube.

Our Approach

Working in close collaboration with BT and its educational partner Barefoot Computing, we devised an overall concept that mixed fun and creative elements with mini games that were grounded in computational thinking concepts. The game was split into several sections:

Create - here a user can create their own avatar with lots of different colours, patterns, hairstyles and accessories on offer to make it look truly unique

Train - putting their avatar through their paces, users had to get the right balance of foods and exercise to get the best physical performance from their avatar - this was tested in the training room where users could see if they had made the right choices.

Also in this section were a series of mini games which introduced the users to a number of computational thinking concepts with themed games around focus, sleep and skill. The better they became at the games, the higher their mind score.

Race - once they were happy, they could take part in a virtual race against random avatars to see how fast they could complete the 100m sprint ahead of the live final.

A subsequent application update added a live event section with content that updated periodically to announce the finalists, broadcast the live final in the application and show the final podium positions.

How Did we do it

The application was built in Unity and was available for both iOS and Android. Rather than creating a bespoke scoring solution, the application integrated with Microsoft’s PlayFab gaming service to allow us to manage a leaderboard, catalogue items, consents and permission. We also included a state machine to control time sensitive application content throughout the competition which could be managed centrally through PlayFab without the need for further application updates. This included leaderboard visibility for finalists but also runtime and video streaming content such a starting line ups and a winners podium.