Sandy Coast Interactive for the Oregon Coast Aquarium

The Oregon Coast Aquarium wants a touch-screen interactive that interprets the animals and habitats of its Sandy Coast gallery: flatfish buried in sand, eelgrass beds with pipefish and prawns, pier pilings with anemones and Dungeness crabs, schooling herring and anchovies. The gallery has live animals and printed signs and no interactive. The Aquarium has no software developers. Your team builds one, installs it in the gallery, and hands it over in a form staff can maintain.

The Aquarium has three formats in mind and will choose one with you in the first weeks of fall:

• Explore a habitat. A scene of one Sandy Coast habitat. Visitors explore it and tap animals or features for more information. The California Academy of Sciences runs a tide-pool version: search a zone, then pick which of three species you found.
• Raise a nest. A multi-stage decision game about bird nesting behavior. Each choice affects the outcome; at the end the visitor learns whether the nesting season succeeded and why. The Aquarium's educators supply the science; the game design is yours.
• Pledge wall. Visitors type a conservation pledge or an answer to a prompt on a monitor. The words are projected on a wall, drift down, and fade as new ones arrive. Needs a profanity filter and a way for staff to remove what the filter misses. The Aquarium's graphic designer produces the artwork. The education team supplies and checks the content. Your team owns the software, the interaction design, the hardware specification, the installation, and the documentation.

Key constraints & realities:

• Decide on the tech stack so the Aquarium can rebuild and reinstall the interactive on new hardware years from now.
• This is exhibit software: a touch screen with no keyboard or mouse, running unattended for months, restarting itself after a power cut, resetting when a visitor walks away mid-session, and working without a network.
• Content (animal names, facts, images, prompts) lives in files staff can edit without a developer.
• Usable by children and by adults who have never seen it, without instructions.
• Testing happens with real visitors on the gallery floor in Newport.
• The Capstone program can provide comparable, inexpensive hardware for development.

The hard part is not the code. It is making something a child understands without instructions that still works in June without anyone touching it.

• Give the gallery an interactive: a visitor walks up, understands it in seconds, and leaves knowing something about a Sandy Coast animal.
• Make it survive the floor: months of unattended use with no IT staff.
• Leave it with the Aquarium: content changes and reinstallation without the original team.

Deliverables, in priority order:

• Format decision and design brief by week 4 of fall: chosen format, habitat or species, screen flow, content list for the education team, art list for the designer, hardware specification.
• Playable prototype with placeholder art by the end of fall, tested with at least five people outside the team.
• Complete interactive by the end of winter: final art and content, attract screen, idle reset, kiosk lockdown, auto-start on boot. Installed on the target hardware and tested on the gallery floor, with findings written up.
• Second floor test in spring, then hardening: every failure seen on the floor fixed, followed by an unattended run of at least two weeks.
• Content editing procedure a staff member with no programming background can follow, verified by having one do it.
• Documentation: build from source, set up a replacement machine, what to do when the screen is frozen, a one-page operations card for gallery staff. Suggested sequencing: fall for the format decision, hardware, and prototype; winter for content, kiosk build, and the first floor test; spring for the second floor test, hardening, handoff, and Engineering Expo.

Stretch goals

• A second format (the pledge wall pairs naturally with either game) if the first is installed and stable by mid-winter.
• Anonymous usage counts (sessions, screens reached) exported for the Aquarium.
• Spanish-language version.
• A browser version for the Aquarium's teacher programs.

• Solid programming skills and comfort building an interface from scratch.
• Willingness to watch strangers use your software, take notes, and change it.
• Ability to work with a graphic designer and educators who are not programmers.
• Basic systems skills: install an operating system, make an application start on boot, keep a machine running without you.
• Git, pull requests, and a team workflow with clear ownership.

• Experience with a 2D game engine, rendering library, or canvas animation.
• UI or game design experience, especially for children or novice users.
• Kiosk or embedded deployment: auto-login, lockdown, recovery from power loss.
• Accessibility work: touch-target sizing, contrast, bilingual interfaces.
• Any shipped project that other people used.