Week 11: Investigating final design

All physical designs we had come up with thus far were creepy.
 Prime example- imagine children having these, creepy or what?:

  

 We started talking about making a 'new species' of animal. Some sort of imaginary creature from space or something that looks really cute and nice.

We talked about just having some sort of blob that didn't represent anything. Just an avocado shaped blob that could be squeezed, touched and manipulated to record that data we needed. Then we decided to  pick the data.

 There was a framework within the EYLF that the kindy teacher told me about and that was the 'spider-web' program whcih was basically where they recorded everything the child did during the day on a piece of paper and it was given to the parent at home time. We figured what with everything being done on the computer nowadays (saves the trees!) that  we would make the data send to an app and an online database that ensured the parent had constant access to the history of information (paper is easy to lose).

With the EYLF we could see that there were three physical activities in particular that the parent would want to know on a day to day basis and three things that the teachers would no longer have to note down anymore if this device did it for them (the sensing the news aspect).

Eating: the time they ate, how many times they ate.

Sleeping: whether they had a nap during rest-pause time

Toilet: how many times a day they went and if they were toilet training still- whether the attempt was sucessful or not.



We wanted these blobs (which we named pebbles for the time being) to be induvidual toys, one per child that they could love and manipulate and personalise and then also there would be a distinction as to which child each set of data belonged to.

We thought that perhaps these could all be programmed up with the childs data at the beginning of the school year and given out to each induvidual child.

The pebbles would live in the classroom so as not to get lost and we thought that it would be nice if the pebbles kind of created the decor for the room. Bright a cheerful and cute little animals lining the walls sounded ncie to us. How do they fit into the room though?
Ann-maree thought of little docks against the walls that looked like trees or something and this could be the pebbles home.


Now we just had to figure out arduino wise, what we could do with interactions.

We went right back to INPUTS and OUTPUTS and with Will's growing Arduino knowledge we started figuring that out.

We initially thought pushing food onto the stomach for a visual representation that they had eaten,
lying it on it's side on the dock for sleeping and shaking it below the dock tree for toilet time.