DEA 5210

Designing Devices for CyberPLAYces

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

As digital experiences isolate us from physical places and embodied play, familiar places offer opportunities to reconnect through tangible interaction design. Using microcontrollers, sensors, actuators, and fabrication techniques, students design, prototype and evaluate devices that shape CyberPLAYces to foster play, community, and engagement, making them resonate with our emotional and social lives.

Prerequisites for Design and Environmental Analysis (DEA) majors: DEA 2201; DEA 2203; DEA 3301; DEA 3308.

Enrollment Information Enrollment preference given to: Design and Environmental Analysis (DEA), Fiber Science and Apparel Design (FSAD), Information Science, Mechanical Engineering majors; and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and minor programs in Robotics.

Fees Materials, $60. Fee for Arduino kit.

Last 4 Terms Offered 2025SP, 2024SP, 2023SP, 2020SP

Learning Outcomes

• To grapple with under-constrained, “wicked” problems and opportunities of living on this planet.
• To demonstrate an ability to design, prototype, and evaluate full-scale, interactive and adaptive devices responsive to these problems and opportunities, and present them in a video.
• To demonstrate, in a written report, an ability to communicate the motivations for, iterative development of, and expected use of the interactive devices, as well as assess their shortcomings.

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