Angry Sheep

The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh offers a hands-on, peer-driven environment with more opportunity for social-emotional learning than most comparable play spaces. It's built for trying, failing, and trying again.

@Children Museum of Pittsburgh

We created a physical-digital experience where children work together to guide projected sheep back into the pen using tools on the table, while responding to the sheep's shifting emotions with a range of comforting strategies.

We collaborated with the team at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. To understand the setting and brief, we visited the museum four times:

During our precedent study, we examined projects from art museums and children's museums around the world, reviewed literature on child-centered design, particularly from the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference (IDC). And made a site visit to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. We synthesized our findings into a territory map to build shared knowledge across the team.

Across all three team members, we pooled interpretation notes from interview and observations, then distilled them through four rounds of synthesis.

Data Collection and Synthesis

With the design principles as our foundation, we generated several concepts and used speed-dating exercises to receive input from peers. To gain a clearer sense of direction, we conducted a participatory workshop with children in the museum.

This allowed us to observe how they interacted with materials, approached shared challenges, and supported each other during play.

Finally, we arrived at the concept — Angry Sheep.

We used tabletop prototyping to work through interaction details and game mechanics before moving into production.

Challenge and Reward

small win/ one sheep enter the pen

big victory/ all sheep back into the pen

Crisis Mode and De-escalation

Crisis Mode

Comforting/ Feeding

Comforting/ Petting

Comforting/ Encouraging

To gather more meaningful feedback, we moved quickly into production with a more interactive prototype. We built and tested on-site at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. The system runs on three layers.

For playtesting, we used a regular table with a projector and camera rack for top-down projection, with ArUco markers placed on top of each object. We used a Wizard of Oz method to manually trigger the sheep's interactions and emotional states.

After playtest, we spent weeks strengthening the connection between physical and digital elements, adding a range of visual and auditory cues to support onboarding. We also reworked the verbal interaction so players feel invited, not pressured, to speak. More detail in the next section.

To reduce latency and remove the top-side markers — which had confused children during playtesting — we switched from top-down to bottom-up projection and built a translucent table that allows both the projection and marker tracking to work from beneath the glass.

For a museum deployment, we envision the team sourcing supplies from standard e-commerce platforms. Each object gets a printed ArUco marker and a base layer on the underside, keeping it table-bound during play and making the marker invisible from above. Museum props wear out quickly, so the design intentionally keeps replacement costs low and maintenance simple.

Here's how the objects evolved across stages: from the left to right (tabletop prototyping → playtest → final prototype.)

What works in simulation doesn't always translate to a real environment. We built tuning panels for object interactions and sound effects: adjusting aggression rate, calm rate, sheep speed, and sheepdog speed to dial in the right difficulty.

The goal is to make the game meaningfully challenging without pushing players to give up.