Prototype

The prototype I plan to produce will be an interactive ‘music room’ for pre teen children in the form of a touch screen table (explained later). Families with children often spend considerable time in ‘waiting areas’ where the children become bored, restless and disruptive. I was recently at an airport where children were running around all over the place, and some getting lost, because there was little for them to do, a couple of arcade games, but nothing really to stimulate or encourage them. So I will be using airports as the primary scenario for my prototype. Of course it could also be used in other waiting areas, crèches, anywhere that keeps children amused in busy places.

The choice of doing a music room came from watching my young cousins over Christmas loving to make noise on their wooden instruments, so I thought why not make this interactive. In turn it would be a lot safer in terms of misuse of objects, and children will be able to learn in a fun and encouraging way when the real instruments are not available to them.

Briefly, what I am aiming to do is to graphically create a music room in which there will be interactive instruments such as keyboard, drums, xylophone, guitar etc around the room (which will be bright, cartoony) and the children will be able to navigate around the room and tap the screen as to which instrument they wish to play on. Simple interaction on the touch screen will be used such as pointing, clicking, tapping, and dragging. Because of the computer generation and novelty factor, children (hopefully) will find playing instruments through a computer exciting.

For example, if the child wanted to play the keyboard, by touching where the keyboard is situated in the ‘room’ it will dominate the screen and become interactive when the child touches the keys which will then initiate the correct sound for that note. There is a similar idea to this here, however it does not allow the child to play chords themselves as they can only click one note at a time, whereas with the touch screen they can tap as many as they like at a time. I also think that children will benefit more from the experience by touching the screen to initiate the music, and pressing more than one key at a time.

The idea is that are able to create their own music and experiment with sound interactively, culturally learning, and keeping them amused. Here are some influential music methods of learning that I could incorporate in my prototype.

Virtual Drums

Online Music Room (quite like this one)

Virtual Guitar and other instruments

 

Ergonomically, the design of the table that the touch screen will be on will have to be child friendly. I have not managed to find any touch screen devices for children other than kiosks, and for practicality I want the child to be able to sit down to play the instruments. For the touch screen computer to be easily accessed, I want to make an all in one seating and table mechanism where the child can sit at a slightly slanted table top surface to easily play with all the instruments. The touch screen will be integrated into the slanted table.

I’ll also have headphones fitted because the application will be quite noisy, especially if there are loads of children on them at once.

Children seem to be facinated and like being able to touch and move things around, even if it’s just a shape or two…

Prototype Research and Idea!

Afternoon/Evening all!

I started my research by looking at the different ways in which people can/are interacting with some existing prototypes out there. I was interested to see what was being created in the world and if the ideas were driven by the way in which the prototype would be interacted with or by what content you interact with! (i.e. what came first the idea to interact in a certain way or the idea of what to interact with.)

I looked at the Electronic Shadow website and found some interesting things. I was most interested in:

I thought the idea of using someones feet to make the frog move around was a good idea and something that really interested me. I found it useful to see what was being created by different people, however it was just intial research and I moved on from looking at Electronic Shadow work as I decided that it didn’t relate much to what I finally decided to do!

Onto the idea! An interactive map of some sort was the first thing that came to mind! As I want to do something that could be useful to people and have a commercial interest as well. After a long think about what else I could do, nothing with the sort of depth and flexibility of a map came to mind. I briefly thought about doing a interactive train network map, but due to the complete mess that the british train network is in I decided that that was a bad idea! I finally decided on doing a map for Bluewater shopping centre. As it is a big place and I felt it could benifit from having an interact map to help the customers find there favourite shops!

Once the idea was decided upon, I started looking at things that are more relent to the idea. So I had a look at existing shopping centre maps. I came across two that had some good features that interested me. There are best used and looked at, so the links are:

Festival Place

Alamoana Center

My plan now is too move onto looking at all forms of interactive maps, as I think I may have been too focused at looking at shopping centre maps to early and my research path should have been wider. I will also be looking at different ways to interact with a kiosk for shopping centres.

Andy Hall

Research – Amanda Tamsett

Hey everyone

For my project I have been looking at the use of interactive games and how they can be used as an educational tool for young children. I found that there are many simple interactive games on the Internet for children to use but thought of an idea of creating one for use within a school. The game would be subject based, for example for my piece I will be basing it around the subject mathematics. For my research I have been looking at different interactive games which are already available. One of the styles of games that I have been looking at was the Brain Training games available for the Nintendo DS. i have been looking at the Brain Age website 

These games are highly successful and demonstrate good use of interactivity. Realistically I would not be able to produce a game of this quality due to constraints.

However, I can take ideas and methods from these games to use in my design and create a simpler but effective game. A feature similar to the Brain Age game i was looking at was the possibility of the use of touch screen technology to make the game more interactive and exciting for the children. This is an idea that can be incorporated into the game if used within a school. However, if used elsewhere then the touch screen technology may become more of an issue.

 

Other research I have been looking at is other interactive games available to play on the Internet. An interesting site is Insight Interactive Games. this site has some simple and some more complex interactive games available on the web. I can use ideas from this also mainly from the word games that I could possibly incorporate into my design.

 

My next step is to continue researching interactive games and look at the features which are most successful amongst children of the right target age, which is likely to be between 6 and 10 years. I would like to create a game which will encourage children to learn about mathematics in a fun and interesting way.