Problem & Concept

Due to the prevalence of using electronic devices, children are incorporating less motor skills to learn and play in their daily lives. Traditional learning techniques generally engage just two senses – hearing and vision – when providing access to information. Tangible Interaction promotes the concept of engaging multiple senses including vision, hearing, touch and even smell and taste as a medium for interacting with learning content.

Based on the problem space stated above, our team came up with the idea of the tangible learning toy ITSY to provide children a better learning tool. ITSY allows the user to learn at a more comfortable pace with more than one interactive input. This allows for a synchronized development of the brain. Targeting both the creative and analytic part of the brain.

Individual Exploration

Each of our team members is going to explore different learning topics by making four different teddy bears. I chose to teach children color and math as my individual exploration. Our target users are children aged 3-5 years old, Research shows that age 3 is a great age to start teaching number and colors and children who are 5 years old are able to count to 30 and represent numbers to 20, and they begin to solve simple math problem using number symbols.

Another research shows that learn math through visuals approach can enhance students’ understanding of mathematical concepts. When people work on mathematics, brain activity is distributed between many different networks, which include two visual pathways: the ventral and dorsal visual pathways. So that when children learn through visual approach, mathematics changes for them, and they are given access to deep and new understandings. I also got inspiration from a toy called ‘shape sorting cube’ which allow kids effectively develop their motor skill by building a box with different cubes.

Final Product

I have built a prototype that allows kids to learn math and color though visual approaches. Users will be given auditory instructions during the process, they can interact with the teddy bear by inserting sticks inside different color areas of a backpack(attach to the teddy bear) based on the instructions. Users will be given math questions based on the number of sticks inside the backpack and users need to do make correct responses to answer the questions such as shaking the bear’s left hand. If users respond correctly, the bear will give both auditory and light feedback

Exhibition

During the exhibition, I have watched lots of interesting and meaningful concept and our team have demonstrated our concepts by using three teddy bears, each of us were working on different learning content and these contents focus on incorporating multi-sensory learning that encourages children to use more than 1 senses to engage with learning. Each prototype utilises the sense of touch, hearing and vision to assist with children’s learning experience. We got many positive feedbacks and many audiences thought our concepts can effectively help kids learning in a funny and interactive environment, and develop their motor skills, we also got many suggestions on how we can incorporate with our concept together.