Lessons Learned: Designing Toys for Children 7months-2yrs
I have spent the past few month deconstructing the cognitive, emotional and social attributes of children under the age of two. I have been particularly interested in understanding why children are more responsive to some toys, then they are for others. What makes a successful toy, and why? What strategies could be used in the development of a toy to foster learning opportunities, along with several other question regarding this ripe age and this medium.
This age is quite interesting since you are not only designing for the child, but also for the parent, who acts as the gatekeeper. This adds an additional level of complexity, and understanding that needs to be understood. So the first question I asked myself was, “What does a parent look for in a toy?”
According to the book, “The Blockbuster Toys”, parents look for toys that;
- Child’s Safety
- Child’s Continued Enjoyment (play value)
- Child’s Creativity
- Child’s Mental & Physical Development
- Child’s Success
- Child’s Health
- Child’s Love
I added some additional bullets that I’ve noticed parents, including myself look into when purchasing a toy:
Multi-Master Arduino Setup using i2c
I working on a project, I was faced with a challenge of creating a serial bus via multiple Arduino which could communicate with each other. My first intuition, after a little push in the right direction by Tom Igoe, was to create a Master/Slave setup where a Master micro-controller polls all the slave micro-controllers, and dispatches an action. Although this answered one of my question, polling didn’t allow for complete 2-way communication. It tuned out that the answer was mainly an oversight of my interpretation of the Wire documentation.
From Arduino Site:
Wire.begin()
Wire.begin(address)
====
Description
Initiate the Wire library and join the I2C bus as a master or slave.
====
Parameters
address: the 7-bit slave address (optional); if not specified, join the bus as a master.
====
Returns
none
I interpreted this explanation as Wire.begin(SomeAddress) would default as a slave, and not be allowed to be a Master. Being as curious, and stubborn as I typically am, i decided to forget what I thought I was being told, and instead try to break the library, so I could then see where it broke, and attempt to adjust it in a way that better suited my need. Surprise, surprise, it worked, and not need to change anything at all! The address parameter is optional and defaults as a master role if no address is set. However if you do plan on sending messages to the master, you could switch speaker and listener roles via a slaves Wire.onReceive(handler) rather then polling using onRequest(handler).
Why I make “Native Mobile Apps” not “Native iPhone Apps”
A little over a year ago, I was drawn to this marvelous device, named the iPhone. All the possibilities that it could bring opening up another outlet for me to develop applications for. Seeing the possibilities, like many developers, I ran out to the nearest Barnes & Noble and bought an “Introduction to iPhone Development” book. I diligently went though each and every chapter, getting acquainted to Objective-C and the iPhone development environment. Then it hit me! Do I want to be an iPhone Developer or a Mobile Developer? What happens when Android gains market share? What about Windows and BlackBerry? iPhone’s reign could only last for so long, and the pack is slowly creeping up.
The iPhone revolution placed blinders on us all, and many of us forgot the obvious. Remember years ago, when you would go to a site only to be greeted with a “Sorry we do not support your current browser, this site is optimized for IE 6″, you would be forced to close you current session on the non-IE browser and open up IE to view the site. What a pain! Eventually, javascript libraries like JQuery, and the adoption of CSS standards have made that less of an issue, although you still see this once in a while. The main difference however between the browser wars, and mobile wars is that browser all interpreted HTML and CSS, with only slight differences. Mobile phone native coding language on the other hand are extremely different. iPhone coding looks very different then Android, which look different the Windows Mobile. That means more resources need to be allocate on a project, costing the perspective client more money. Not exactly a smart investment, and unfortunately there is no “Export to Android” option in Apple’s XCode software.
Sensing Child’s Play: Examining 7 toys from the toybox
I have always had a fascination with trying to understand how the things around me work. It just so happens that after having a child, most of the thing around me are toys. Large toys, small toy, blinking lights, sounds, singing, haptics, interactivity, it is all pretty darn amazing when you sit back and really look at how much technology my little one year old daughter navigates and interacts with during play. Many time when we think of children and technology we automatically think of desktop computers and video game consoles. Although all of these are examples of technology the only interaction my daughter has with them is me telling her, “don’t touch”, and handing her a toy to distract her attention.
I decided to take a trip to my daughter’s toy collection to examine some of the sensing capabilities that her electronic toys offer. I will specifically focus on the toys input capabilities:
(At the end of the post there is a video of me trying to figure out how the LeapFrog Tag Jr works. Let me know your thoughts.)
Fisher-Price Elmo Live Encore
This is by far one my daughters favorite toys. The toy is modeled after Elmo, a Sesame Street character, which most children a quickly drawn to by his bright red color, large eyes, and youthfully fun voice.
Inputs
- Push Buttons: Typically buttons on toys are visually obvious, however Fisher Price decided to create an exploratory interaction by spreading out four button throughout the plush doll. Three of the buttons are hidden under the fabric, on the toe, chest, and back, and the final button switch is closed by squeezing his nose.
- Tilt Sensor: One of the nice additions that the creators added to the toy was integration of a Tilt Sensor. When Elmo falls on his side, he politely ask for help to stand backup, which is sometime accompanied with a joke.
Initial Test of my Expandable/Interchangeable Circuit
So what do i mean by expandable? Basically the idea is that I would like the cheapest possible way to be able to create a circuit that I could chain sub circuits too (those are the 2 sub circuits in the video). After lots of trial and error, I was able to put on my crafty hat to make these darn electrons work the way I wanted them too.
In the accompanying video, I give a quick run through of how the circuit works. Essentially, the main goal that I was able to achieve was that I would be able to clone one the inner circuits and add it right in the middle. All I would need to do is connect them to the 2 digital pins, 2 analog pins, one ground, and one 5V series, and it should work without any additional rewiring (although the idea is to make the sub circuits slightly different in their interaction, yet the same in their communication), asides from programing the EEPROM (I used the 24LC256 from SparkFun for $1.95) to contain a unique identifier. The secret to success…diodes..lots of them.
I based my code on a great snippet of code to help me get the I2C communication working on my EEPROMs. I also checked out a helpful tutorial which also helped me out substantially.
One quick tip: Keep in mind that Arduino has an EEPROM mounted on the chip. I intially made the silly mistake of using the EEPROM code that is found on the Arduino tutorial page. This code was reading and writing data on my Arduino’s board mounted EEPROM, which i quickly realized once I realized that the unique data I was writing on each external EEPROM chip did not seem to be working properly.
So why go through all this extra effort?
Post TEDxNYED Thoughts
This past Saturday, March 6th, I was given the opportunity to attend my first TEDx event. I didn’t really know what to expect, I typically only attend technical conferences filled with pocket protector wearing programmers. Okay we don’t wear pocket protectors, but that doesn’t make it any less of a complete geek fest, me included. Anyhow, to start, I must applaud the group of educators that ran the event. The location was great, the line up of speakers was very good, and overall I had an amazing time. However, there where a couple of suggestions, or maybe some preconceive expectations that I may have had prior to attending.
Although I believe that many of the speakers where amazing, at points I felt like i was at an educators pep rally. Don’t get me wrong, it is always great to get other educators excited about certain topics, however much of what was being talked about is nothing new of innovative. For instance, I think just about everyone knows that standardized testing is probably not the best way to assess students, but how could you successfully implement portfolio based assessments? One speaker touched on it, however I really wanted more examples, more case studies. I basically wanted the speakers ideas, so I could tweak them start putting them into practice. Most of the talks were powerful in there own way, I unfortunately didn’t quite get that “Ah ha!” moment that i was hoping for.
Update Twitter Status w/ Arduino & Processing
The next phase of my project was to send the serial communication from my Arduino, over to Processing, which then would formulate a status update based on the button you pressed and send it over to Twitter. I’ve worked with several Twitter API’s in the past, so I decided to go with Twitter4J, the “J” in this case stands for Java, which works perfectly with Processing.
Bellow is an updated version of my previous Arduino coding. I plan on switching the status updating to the Processing side, instead of the Arduino side. If this where to be a real product, it would be easier to download a software update, then to have to reprogram the toy itself. I will add that to my todo list, once i get all the major
Arduino: Print a Single Serial Message per Button Press
So I’ve been working on a new project and have run into a bit of an issue. I plan to send a serial message over to Processing, however it very important that I don’t send multiple values stating the same button press. Since Arduino is in a constant loop state, when i press a button using something like:
Will Wright presents “Why Games are Good for Learning” at NYU
The Games for Learning Institute was gracious enough to invite Will Wright, the genius behind games such as The Sims and Spore, to speak about “Why Games are Good for Learning”. I’ve watched him speak in the past via youtube videos, and have always been impressed by the insight he brings to the gaming industry. Games such as SimCity, have broken down so many boundaries and have help in redefining several aspects of gaming. He has managed to empower children, though a constructionist approach by giving them the ability to become producers of their worlds, and not merely consumers. These ideologies fall in line with much of Seymour Papert’s work with LEGO and LOGO along with the ideas of Maria Montessori.
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori
Why Serious Games are not Fun
This was an obvious question to start off the talk.
DIY Simon with Arduino w/ Source and Diagram
So i finally had time to tinker around with this Simon Sez project again. Turns out there wasn’t an issue after all with my circuits, it was an issue in my code. I also did some house keeping on the code, and created a nice little diagram using Fritzing, an awesome app that was recommend to our class
