Video Games for Everybody: Designing a One-Handed Videogame Controller

Since they were introduced around fifty years ago, videogames have slowly become one of the most popular forms of entertainment in many societies. For much of that time, they were seen as little more than children's toys, but as whole generations have grown up with them, the audiences have gotten broader. More importantly, for our purposes, since the Internet became widely available to ordinary people, video games have been developing into not just entertainment, but the centers of online communities, and even into competetive "sports" of a sort. What this means is that, for some people, videogames are very important, and it's a very big deal to lose the ability to play them because of a physical disability. In particular, many videogames require the use of some kind of controller, and these usually require both hands to use. If someone loses a hand or arm, it becomes a lot harder to play videogames with one of these controllers.

The Project

That's where you come in. In this project, you'll be designing a one-handed videogame controller that's capable of replacing an ordinary one, so somebody with only one hand can still participate in a game with as little disadvantage as possible. To do so, you'll need to use industrial design, engineering, and CAD skills, and you'll need to be creative to meet these challenging goals.

While there are many places your class could go with this project, the STEM Explorer is equipped to help you produce one concrete product: a 3D-printed mockup of your game controller design, without any working electronics inside, but with mock buttons (and switches, and joysticks, and whatever else your controller design needs) so you can demonstrate how it fits in a person's hand,and how good its ergonomics are. If your school and teacher are feeling particularly ambitious, you might choose to do more than this, for example designing a working prototype that you can actually control a videogame with, but for this roughly five-week project, we'll have more than enough to do simply designing and manufacturing your mockups.

The Standards

This project is designed to meet Michigan's HS-ETS1-2 and HS-ETS1-3 engineering standards, and many of ISTE's Student standards. For more information, you can read our standards summary document, Michigan's standards document, and the ISTE's standards page.

The Rubric

You can see the rubric that your teacher will use to grade your project here.

Important Links

• We'll be using Onshape for all of our CAD work. Onshape is a professional-grade CAD package that runs "in the cloud", and that you control from your browser. It is free of charge for educational users (like you).
• You'll also want to refer to our Onshape tutorial videos to help you learn how to make models. All of these videos should be useful for your project, and you may find you need to seek out even more learning materials to successfully build your model.
• You'll probably want to use modelling clay as part of your design process, to test out some designs. If you don't have any, and can't or don't want to buy any, ThoughtCo has some good recipes that you can follow to make your own.
• If you're a teacher, you can get more information about the project from our summary presentation and sign your class up with our signup form.

Step by Step

• First, you'll need to watch the STEM Explorer team's introductory lecture. We'll try to deliver one live, either in person or over videoconference, but if we can't make that work you can watch our recorded version.
• Next, you'll want to follow along with our Onshape tutorial so you learn the CAD basics you'll need to model your design. Your project, in particular, will require some relatively fancy modelling, so watching all of the videos will be very important.
• Once you understand how to use Onshape, your next step should be to not use Onshape yet. (That's disappointing, isn't it?) You should do some brainstorming of your design before you even start trying to model it in Onshape, so you know what you need to build. You should make 2D design sketches with a pencil and paper at a minimum, and you'll probably find it very helpful to create — and measure! — 3D mockups with something like modelling clay, so you can get an idea of how your design will feel in your hand before you build it. Your teacher will probably want to collect your 2D sketches as an assignment.
• When you have a good idea of what your design should look like, it's finally time to get down to the business of modelling it in Onshape. You'll have what may be the most challenging modelling task of all of our high school CAD projects, but you'll also have your teammates to collaborate with, and the STEM Explorer team will be available to assist you. This part might take as long as two weeks to finish.
• When your Onshape designs are all done, you'll need to share them with the STEM Explorer team, who will use the STEM Explorer's 3D printers to turn them into real, physical mockups. This process will probably take another two weeks, because 3D printers are slow, and the STEM Explorer's printers in particular will probably be very busy. When they're all done, we'll mail them to your school, and you'll test them out to see how easy they are to use.
• Finally, your team will prepare a presentation about your design and deliver it to your classmates. When you're all done, your class will decide on one project to submit to the STEM Explorer team for inclusion in the STEM Explorer Engineering Hall Of Fame website.