This week was a bit more hectic than expected, because we ended up losing two team members and gaining a new one. I completely understand people's reasons for choosing to drop the course at this time, and it was nice that we had some time this week to sort out the new directions we would take as a result of feedback from last week's presentation, as well as new team formation.

Following meetings across the studio and workshop sessions this week, we decided that individual concepts would work best for our team set up, as none of us live together, and it would be difficult to collaborate on a single design. We decided to focus on using music and sound in a primary school classroom setting to help learn in other non-musical areas, such as maths and art. We then helped each other flesh out our individual concepts through discussion and brainstorming.

At the beginning of this week, I was undecided on what my concept would be, other than a vague idea of somehow using music to help students learn braille. I did some research into this during the week, as well as spoke to tutors during studio time, and ultimately came to the conclusion that there is very little consensus on the 'correct' associations between sounds and letters, and it would be very difficult to justify any design decisions I made because of this.

Therefore, after being inspired by my team mate Maria and her focus on using sound to learn multiplication, I decided to create a concept around another mathematical concept, as it is much easier to find research about links between maths and music. I came up with the idea of using weights and musical rhythm to help students conceptualise ratios and fractions in a new way. At this stage, I'm thinking that users will place weights on a sensor, and the amount of weight will correspond to how long the note will play for. So a note with 200g of weight will play for twice as long as a note with 100g of weight. I will need to spend some time developing this further, and come up with an idea of what this device might look like.