The Maze: Scarecrow's Revenge, Agricultural Education and Outreach Through Game Development

ABSTRACT

Extended reality is known as a technical term encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. It is a niche technology domain that finds its way through virtually every sector, from academia to businesses and industries. Its success is due to the level of immersion it brings to the user. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its unprecedented consequences and lockdowns, amplified the advantages of immersive education and learning through extended reality technology. The technology extension to smartphones and Web pages has enabled its accessibility to a level expected to grow beyond the pandemic era. Due to the rural locations of farms, agriculture is a great candidate where extended reality technology can strengthen its reach to a more enormous population for education, promotion, and outreach. The current study, at the intersection of the agricultural sector and extended reality technology, presents the development of a three-dimensional interactive game to promote the Tennessee corn. The game is developed in Unity engine (version 2020.3.12). It is a single-player, first-person perspective game, where the arrow keys make a farmer character navigate turns and obstacles within a corn maze. Scarecrows will appear over the game course and force the player to answer a trivia question about corn production and usage. The player moves forward unchanged with correct answers to the trivia questions;however, the player will lose a life from their five-life total with an incorrect answer. The goal is to escape the maze by correctly answering trivia questions, navigating the maze, and finding bonus lives scattered throughout. The study discusses the design process of player movements, camera movements, objects interactions, and other game-play mechanics. With our target audience primarily set to middle school students in rural areas, the game was successfully developed and released as a Web-based game (https//bar.rancsgroup.com/TheMaze/ ). Our current plan is to extend the game with optional difficulty levels as well as release smartphones applications through major platforms. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.