07 February 2017
The product design team helped turn entrepreneur, Keegan Duncan’s embryonic idea for an electronic jumping game called Skroppy into functioning interactive game. Keegan saw a gap in the market for a portable, electronic skipping game aimed at encouraging children to play outdoors.
The final product that the design team at GX built utilised light, sound and motion to create a visually appealing and unique electronic skipping game. Having developed an initial prototype Keegan took this working device to exhibit at several toy fairs across the UK.
The game was also entered to the British Invention of the Year Awards 2016, where it scooped two platinum awards; one for the best leisure invention and the another for best design. The product development team at GX are justifiably proud of their work, commenting on the award, design director Gary Ross said, “In essence the idea seemed relatively simple, however to develop a working prototype involved the design engineers working in tandem with our mechanical engineers and software programmers.
In place of a skipping rope, we used an electronic beam, projected from a rotating disc mounted on a pole, that also rose and fell to introduce another challenge to the player. Our software engineers played an integral part developingd bespoke software to allow various levels of difficulty, as well as to record the individual scores of up to four players.”