Harmony Honey Monroe
Creater of ROTA, Tiny Crate, and Candy Wrapper. All Open Source games made with Godot. Working with Andres Colubri and Facundo Fernandez on Operation Outbreak, under the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. See my work at harmonymonroe.com
Sessions
Operation Outbreak (OO) is an innovative platform for science education that uses a mobile app to spread a “digital” virus among participants’ phones via Bluetooth. This enables immersive real-life outbreak simulations that have been tested in hundreds of schools in the US and abroad. You can learn more about OO by checking this website: https://operationoutbreak.org/
In this talk, we will describe the prototype of a Godot-based port of the Operation Outbreak educational game. We started working on this prototype back in December of 2024, based on an initial exploration by a graduate intern in the Colubri lab, which were continued by two skilled Godot developers that joined the team after reading a posting about the project on the Godot forum. The prototype successfully implemented all the basic functionality of the real-life Operation Outbreak simulations, including contact detection, disease transmission, illness progression, resource management, etc. Furthermore, the Godot-based OO game reuses all the existing OO backend infrastructure, which makes it possible to read the same parameters that drive the phone-based simulations, store the resulting data in the same databases, and explore the data interactively with the web-based Outbreak Visualizer tool.
We are currently designing plans to pilot this prototype at schools in the US and abroad, to evaluate the engagement of students with this new educational game and collect their feedback. Based on the success of these plans in the coming months, we may be able to report preliminary results and insights during the talk.