Today we had our official first meeting as a team. We have managed to come up with an idea that helps to create an interactive learning experience for children with learning disabilites.Due to modern technology these days, children are incorporating less motor skills to learn and play in their daily lives and based on our own research, we learnt that tangible interaction promotes the concept of engaging multiple senses as a medium for interacting with medium content.

Dicussion

We discuss on various design that might help incorporate motor skills to allow for a syncrhonized development of the brain. One of the design was a resemblence of a shape shorter box where it allows kids to learn how to put in the correct shapes into the hole. If they manage to put the right shape into the correct spot, the hole will light up "green" and the voice projector will say "good job!" where as if they put the shape into an incorrect hole the voice projector will say "Opps, try again!". We thought about it and find that this design is too mundane and it doesn't require kids to have a lot of interactive inputs, therefore, we decidedto drop this idea.

Main Idea

We wanted to create something that is cute for the kids to play with and we have the idea of using a teddy bear. The name of this is bear is "Itsy" and it helps kids to incoporate motor skills to learn simple math. We are trying to target kids in general but mainly for children with learning disabilties. Itsy will be connected to a web platform where math questions will be posted on the platform. There will be a voice projector on Itsy which will tell the kids if they got the correct answers. The ear of Itsy will light up "Green" for correct answer or "Red" for Wrong answer.Itsy will have different interactive outputs which will be a little challenging for kids but it helps them to learn better.

Challenges

We want to try to incorporate voice detection on Itsy it can detect kids voices. However, speech recognizer only recognize only up to a few numbers of commands. We might look into other means of interaction medium and also more indepth research on what kind of learning is better for kids with learning disabilities