The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) recently conducted a huge remodelling project for the National Electoral Education Centre (NEEC) educational space in Old Government House, Canberra. Monkeystack was commissioned to produce a 3D interactive game for the space and provide a seamless experience between the physical and digital world.
We produced the 3D game ‘DemocraCity’ using Maya and Unity, achieving a compelling and educational interactive experience for deployment on large touchscreens designed for self-directed learning. The game is built as a 3D world full of buildings, unique characters, vehicles and interiors. We developed multiple minigames that feature drag and drop, tabletop and role-playing mechanics to deliver learning through fun as a user’s newfound knowledge is put to the test.
Users are guided through the experience by ‘Democrabot’ and are presented with information, interact with and assist various characters in scenarios, and navigate through many spaces including Parliament House. One interactive minigame challenge is to drive the ‘Democrabus’ – a portal-jumping vehicle that quizzes the user and requires them to manoeuvre left or right to select the correct answer. It’s Democracy meets Guitar Hero!
Animated election journey maps that we produced can be found through the NEEC program, designed as one of the mechanisms to navigate DemocraCity.
Some of the 15,000 students that have visited the NEEC’s new space so far have experienced the 100 unique animations, 20 different minigames, 40 unique interactable characters, and 14 educational videos that make up the experience across 18 interactive stations, with much more in store.
The games take visiting groups of school children on a learning journey aligned to the Australian Curriculum, with each school group’s experience determined by the location of the school. Each school group are presented with activity modules, electorate information and maps reflecting their state using personalised data.
Educators can access the data from their trip to DemocraCity as well as teaching resources to take the experience into the classroom.
We worked with the AEC and the commissioned architect and interior designer to transform their remodelled activity space into an immersive, fun and educational interactive zone that reflected DemocraCity’s design. This included visual treatments and other content used in the Centre including multiple animations to feature throughout the full 90-minute tour, an animated video exploring the history of democracy and voting in Australia and a video to accompany an interactive ballot draw process that encapsulate key learnings after visiting DemocraCity.