This repository contains the Unity project for the "Colour Monster" single-player game, including C# scripts, resources like images for sprites, sounds played during the game etc.
This game was developed to help children aged 6-10 yo train their emotional competence skills, including the ability to correctly identify emotions in themselves and others and elaborate on their experiences with those emotions (self-disclosure). At each game round, the player is tasked with identifying the emotions of characters depicted in stories told by a robot. By every correct guess, the player gets a coloured chip, where the colour is associated with the emotion of the character in the story. The goal of our game is to collect all the coloured chips i.e. to correctly guess all emotions. The robot assumes the role of the storyteller, using verbal behaviour and facial expressions to aid children in that task.
- Version: created in Unity version 2021.3.24f1 for Mac.
- Elmo Wrapper: consists of a C# wrapper to communicate with the robot's REST API.
- Robot: the robot used was ID Mind's Elmo robot used by GAIPS (research group at INESC-ID, IST).
⚠️ This is an older software version of the robot, which can be found here.
Digital version of a board game inspired by a children's book by Anna Llenas.
In the original board game, players take turns at moving a monster-shaped pawn through a path of six coloured houses, % -- blue, green, red, yellow, pink, black -- where each colour represents an emotion: blue is sadness, green is calmness, red is anger, yellow is joy, pink is love and black is fear. During their turn, the player has to tell a story that evokes the particular emotion associated with the house that the pawn lands in,winning a chip of the corresponding colour. The chip is collected by being stored in a jar of corresponding colour. The game ends once all the chips are gathered.
This game was created for research purposes for a study conducted in GAIPS (research group at INESC-ID, IST) to investigate the effects of using child-robot interaction to enhance a game for emotional competence training of children in the classroom.
At each game cycle, the child rolls the die and the pawn jumps through the houses accordingly. Then, the robot tells a short one sentence story. Each story has two parts: a scenario (e.g. "Dinis was at school..."), and an emotion allusive ending (e.g. ``...and he lost his favourite game"). The scenario corresponds to the icon on the house (home, school, park, playground, beach, living room, car). %e.g., in the example in the Figure, the story takes place at home. Each story has six different endings labelled with the six different emotions. One ending corresponding to an emotion that the child has not collected yet will be randomly selected e.g. if the child already collected yellow, the ending will be chosen among all except the one labeled "happy". The child is then tasked with identifying the emotion of the character in the story by dragging the corresponding colour chip to the circle containing the question mark in the centre of the board. If the association is deemed correct, the house will light up in the same colour. Otherwise, the house will be "locked" and that emotion will not be collected. If the child correctly identifies six emotions before ten game cycles, they win the game. The child loses by making four mismatches between emotion and story.
Used originally with idmind's Elmo, the script can be used to generate text-to-speech and incorporated into any robot if the robot communication (Elmo Controller script) is adapted.
If you have any problems, questions or ideas contact Joana Brito via this email or Anouk Neerincx.