Today I presented my heart rate turn timers at the Arduino Showcase at Furtherfield Commons, organised by Codasign and Furtherfield. These timers were part of my errant gaming project, which looked at what happened to games when you created areas of uncertainty or brought in forces that shouldn’t be there.

As previously described, the timers work by allowing you turns after a set number of heartbeats. You wait 60 beats and then have 12 beats to take as many turns as you like. Reactions and approaches were varied - the short gap between turns and possibly the public nature of the environment

My favourite reaction though was that of a little girl, who proclaimed that she didn’t like it as she didn’t have time to think. She then took off the timer and even insisted her opponent ‘play properly’. In general, children seemed a little unsettled by the disruption. Perhaps if you are still in the process of forming a view of the world and its activities, it could be a little unpleasant to see it disrupted?