Freshman creates life-size version of popular app Free Flow

The app Flow Free, rated an average of 4.6 out of 5 by 208,000 people on the Android Market, is a highly addictive Flash game where players draw “pipelines” connecting dots of different colors together. However, the pipelines cannot intrude on the boundaries of pipelines of other colors, and all the spaces on the grid have to be used. 

Until now, Flow Free, along with many other apps, has always been restricted onto the screen of a touchscreen phone, iPad or at the most, a computer screen. Could there be an interactable, life-size version?

Freshman Matthew Tung and two other students from local schools have made this possible. Say hello to the Grid, an 8-by-8 matrix of 19.5-inch by 19.5-inch tiles that can sense people standing on the tiles and can react based on the game being played. The Grid is currently dissembled after being shipped back from New York.

The Grid, in addition to playing Flow, can also be programmed to play various types of grid-based games, such as Rush Hour, in which players attempt of move a car out of a maze of cars without removing the other cars. 

The Grid won six Editor’s Choice Awards and four Educator’s Choice Awards at the Maker Faire: Bay Area in May and the World Maker Faire in New York in September.

Tung said his original inspiration for the project came from playing the game itself. Brainstorming of the project started last November, and he started making the Grid last January.

Tung said that he decided to make a life-size version of Flow because he and his friends, freshman David Dunaway from Harker, eighth grader Sami McGinnis from Valley Christian, wanted to have a project to take to Maker Faire, a fair hosted around the world to celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the do-it-yourself mindset. 

“At the time, we [three] played Flow, so it seemed like a great idea to build it,” Tung said.

The trio recruited more friends to help with their project. However, Tung and his friends found that the project was harder than they had anticipated.

According to Tung, the group was using a modular tile design approach and used an Arduino Mega, a micro-controller, in each tile.

“The tiles have to communicate with their neighboring tiles, so we had to wire connections between tiles by hand and some connections were not as reliable as we would have liked when we tested them manually,” Tung said. 

Tung said the group also had trouble fundraising, but the community was sympathetic to their cause and helped alleviate the financial problems.

“We had a contact at Google [who] was able to go in to pitch and raised some money,” Tung said. “We also were able to pitch to the lumber yard owner and received good discounts on the wood [of the construction of the Grid] that we bought.”

According to Tung, the group successfully used a Gofundme, an online fundraising site, to raise the money to buy the necessary supplies for the project. To fund the trip to the World Maker Faire in New York, they tried a Kickstarter campaign. 

“Unfortunately, we were not able to reach the threshold to get the campaign funded, but we had a great experience working on the Kickstarter campaign,”  Tung said.

When the group presented their prototype of 16 tiles to the Maker Faire: Bay Area in May, the Grid prototype was received positively.

Tung said that based on the audience’s suggestions at the Maker Faire, the rest of the project was designed accordingly and was taken to New York in September to be presented. 

There, they won several Editor’s Choice Awards and enjoyed talking to an audience of 100,000 about their experiences working on the project.

Tung said that in addition to learning a wide variety of physical skills, such as how to code and how to budget a project, he had a fun time working on it.

“Many times, it was very frustrating to have to work on the project as well as school and music,” Tung said. “However, I continued with the project and it paid off. From this, I learned that we should always see through anything that we commit to.”