The Visual Sentence Builder
on Multitouch
Group:
Anders Baggethun
Gunn Kristin Breien Johansen
Lill Francis Miranda Reyes
Monika Køller
A Reactable at the Altman Center in 2007 (Williams 2007).
The idea
Our concept is to give children the opportunity to combine fun with learning, in form of a playful experience. We are going to do this by developing an application on multitouch where
children will learn how to put together certain sentences visually. The task for them is to touch
different selections of graphical cards that represents the words in the specific sentence.
Problemspace
What:
We will try to create a multitouch board for children. They will be presented with
textual and audio-read sentences e.g. “the yellow cat on the roof”, or more complex sentences from poems, songs etc. The task is to recognize the words in visual digital cards
spread out on the table. The goal for the kids is to simultaneously touch the correct cards
which is related to the words in the sentence.
Why: We want the kids to experience cooperation through games. There is also learning
aspects here, in a sense that it can be helpful in progressing reading and writing abilities. The
children may also improve their cognition when they do the mental translation from words to
pictures.
Who: The target group for our product are children of ages ranging from 4-8 years. We
have chosen a broad age group at the moment. We will later try to find out, through research
and workshop sessions with the children, who we should be targeting with the final product.
Goals: Our goal is first and foremost to create a tool that is both fun and stimulates to
learning. To achieve this, we must ensure the kids in our target group find the device both intuitive and interesting. The device needs to be:
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Instantly appealing to our target audience
Easy to understand and use without any prior knowledge
Give the kids visual and audible feedback, encouraging further use
Inspire to learning, while still feeling like a game
Encourage - or even require – cooperation
Multitouch. Online image by Rinkle Sony 2010
Conceptual Model
On the multitouch board itself there will be shown:
• a sentence on the top of the screen, containing some objects to be displayed.
• several image cards of different objects in the main area of the screen. Some of them will
represent the subjects in the sentence.
• a timer counting up from zero.
The game starts with numerous image-cards popping up over the screen. A voice is reading
the sentence and the clock starts counting. Then the children will have to touch the pictures
of the objects that the sentence contains of. There will also be other images around, not related to the sentence, so the children will have to look for the right ones.
Depending on the amount of players, children's age, and level of the game there will be from
one/two objects and up to choose from. If e.g. there are two players, there will be between
three and four subjects and so on. That means that when many children are playing, they
have to cooperate, communicate and play together to carry through.
When all the images have been pressed (and still is pressed), the task is done. The clock
stops and displaying the time spent. At the end there will be a form of visual and audible reward, such as “Congratulation – You Did It!” or some kind of fireworks over the screen.
Since we have a wide user group, we can use the timer to increase or decrease the complexity factor. If the task is completed fast, the complexity factor will go up, and for sow completions the time will be extended for the next game.
The more children that are playing, the longer the sentences will be, and the more subjects
they have to choose from. We are going to record the sentences, and there will be overall
between 100-200 different sentences to choose from.
The next step is to make a nice and child-friendly design of these ideas.
A rough draw of a sentence and corresponding examples of objects.
Assumptions
We, as grown-ups, can just assume that this will be useful and fun for the kids. Maybe they
find it boring? They might not be interested in playing with words and pictures? We will have
to see it from their perspective. We have a few assumptions we will have to take into consideration in order to develop something that the children hopefylly will respond to in a positive
and educational way. Which is, as stated earlier, the main idea of this project.
• Children enjoy the simple concept of something responding to their commands.
• Another assumption is children's’ ability to understand technology and quickly adjust to
new environments and new technical products. Therefore, too much instructions on how
the game works and how to solve the tasks on the multitouch table will be unnecessary.
• We think that if the children get negatively respond to their actions, they will automatically
avoid it. The system will therefore have an encouraging nature and no negative respond to
failure.
• Children know a lot more about technology and how they work than we might expect as it
has surrounded them all their lives.
We will later conduct some fieldwork with children. Interviewing them , and make them test
out some prototypes.
Constraints
• What is the preferred age for such a game? Should there be different levels of difficulty depending on age and mentality. We will have to explore through workshops and discussions
with the end users and clarify if we should focus on one group age or create something that
may be enjoyed for all ages.
• We also have to consider the height and size of the multitouch table. It has to be large/wide
enough for multiple children to play at the same time, but also small enough for them to
reach the images on the board.
• Since we are designing for kids the product should tolerate hard usage, e.g. protection of
the screen, and high quality, robust table.
• There will also be children who are more modest than some, and will not have the courage
to jump in join the game while somebody else are playing.
References
Rinkle Sony, (2010): Ubuntu 10.10 to bring Multitouch for Netbooks and Tablets. Rinkle Sony Upadhyay, [Online Image] 22 August, Available at: http://rockstar.99k.org/?p=46 [Acessed 23 September 2010].
Williams, Daniel (2007): The Reactable. [Online Image] 11 June 2007, Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactable [Accessed 23 September 2010].