The New Forest Cicada Project

What would be like to use the Cicada Hunt app? How will we use it? If you are courious and cannot wait, you can play our game in one of our public engagement events. Download the app from the market before coming.

WARNING: This game can ONLY be played with external hardware. Do not attempt to play it without it if because nothing will happen.

How is it played?

It's simple. Imagine you are in the forest, surrounded by trees and nature. You are looking for the New Forest cicada. Hold your phone up and let it guide you to find four different cicadas. They are scattered around all our public events. What do they look like? Well, head to the origami page and have a look.

Now, there are four of them, one red, one blue, one green and one yellow. They all sound similar, and not too far from the real cicada call. Inside the paper case is an electronic cicada which emits a square wave at a particular frequency:

The app will have a sonogram, like the one in the picture on the right. This means that each circular band around the logo in the centre corresponds to a 1 kHz band. If a cicada is near, the correspondent band will light up. For example, for the red cicada the 15th band will light up. That is a clear indicator that a cicada is there, but might not be very clear which one it is. Lookout for the colour band at the bottom of each cicada's icon. They will show you which one is singing.

When you find all four cicadas, you win the game. At this point head back to our stand, where we can tell you more about the real cicada app and how you can help us find the New Forest cicada before it becomes extinct.

Upcoming events

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Past Event

British Science Festival

Science and Engineering Day

Solent Big Bang Fair