Entrepreneurship includes high pressure situatons where one pitches passionate ideas to a panel of critical business professionals. This was one of our projects. We replicated the TV show Shark Tank with a panel of students from the upper STEM Class IV who were interested in a business major. Groups from our class had to pitch a product to them with a business model. Each group had to present a game idea and a prototype that was playable.
The project is to create a game that will potentially be the next public craze. Due to some restrictions, I only had one other person in my group, and our plans were big. We got inspired by the current popular games such as: Kan-Jam, Cornhole, Washers, and Polish Horseshoes. We wanted to include several people in a fun outdoor door with simple, easy rules and quick games while still keeping people's interest.
After a few rounds of brainstorming, we came up with Plinko Pong. Plinko Pong is a plinko board with a backboard where players take turns throwing game pieces into cups at the top of the board that are marked with Point Multipliers. The pieces fall through the board into slots at the bottom that
indicate how many points a player would get.
The entire building process is here: Plinko Pong Engineering Journal
We also created a rule book and a scoreboard to include with the Board Prototype. Lastly, we built a box to hold the prototype decorated with bright, fun colors. This box also had our logo on the front along with our slogan "Are You the Lucky Player?"
The scoreboard can be found here: Plinko Pong Scoreboard
The rulebook can be found here: Plinko Pong Rulebook
To prepare for the pitch, our group created a presentation with all our business information. For the final touch, with the help of a friend, we created a full commercial for Plinko Pong. Our goal was to target families in a fun way.