TNT Board: An Interactive Electronic Board Game

In summer 2020, a research and enrichment program funded by a Student Engagement, Retention, and Success (SERS) grant from the Tennessee Board of Regents took place in the form of online/remote delivery. The goal of the program was to improve the GPA and retention rate of underrepresented and minority students by engaging them in multidisciplinary and collaborative summer projects. This paper presents the project carried out by one of the student groups, in which two students in Mechatronics Engineering and one student in Computer Science worked together remotely and designed and implemented an interactive board game using Arduino Mega and various other electronics and mechanical parts. The board consists of six games and is fun to play for all age groups. All student participants had no prior experience with Arduino, but with the help from the faculty mentor, they were able to learn it quickly and complete the project within 4 weeks. Although each student was primarily responsible for two games, the project was a true multidisciplinary collaboration: the computer science student led the efforts of setting up GitHub for software programming and source management whereas the mechatronics engineering students conducted mechanical design for the board. In this paper, we will present the mechanical, electrical, and software design of the board game. The bill of materials and the details of remote collaboration will also be included. On the educational front, we discuss a couple of efforts that helped the students: (i) We designed an introductory training lesson to introduce Arduino to them and (ii) We utilized project-based learning techniques to encourage them to learn new things along the way.