Next Steps

When testing our room, one of the main problems we noticed was how difficult it was to pick up an egg. It often took well over a minute, which is much too long if we want the players to be able to pick up and place multiple eggs within the time space of a couple of minutes. The main reason why it was so difficult to pick up an egg was because the lack of magnets on the egg. The current egg design has 3 washers glue to it, however it seems like the electromagnet has to be placed right up against it and parallel to it in order for it to pick it up. We could improve this by using completely magnetic eggs, or finding a way to cover more of the egg with magnets. In the video below, a team struggles for about 30 seconds to pick up the egg, even though a lot of the time the electromagnet is placed directly over an egg.

Another improvement that could be made is adding a base that slants towards the center so all the egss fall towards the center of the well. This would help with picking up the eggs as we noticed through play testing that it was very difficult to pick up eggs along the edge of the well's wall. For example, the egg circled in the image would be extremely difficult to pick up due to the lack of magnets on the egg and how difficult it would be to get the electromagnet at the right angle.

Finally, we noticed that the rope we used was not heavy enough to allow the electromagnet to naturall lower back to the bottom of the well after it was lifted to the top. The players had to feed the rope back into the pulley in order to bring the magnet back back down to get the next egg. This seemed a unnatural to most players. To change this we could swap out the twine rope for heavy chains. In the image, we see the electromagnet hanging near the top since it won't fall down on its own.