Everyday Objects - Project Update

Project Introduction

Children are born into history. They have no memory of it, yet they find themselves in the middle of a story that began before they became one of its characters. Children also want to have a place in history. However, given the limited ability of their reading ability and cognitive development, engaging children with history is not an easy task.Nonetheless, there’s one thing children enthusiastic about and probably do better than we expected—-playing games, which provides a good opportunity to involve children into a learning process at the same time having a lot of fun.

This project aims right at addressing the question of how we can effectively engage children with historical learning using an educational game, the target audience of which are pre-school children aging from 6 to 10. This game can prepare them with a preliminary sense of history before they receive proper historical education at school.

The aspect of history covered in the game is about the evolution of everyday table objects encountered by children in their daily life. They are required to decorate tables from different time period(eg.Roman Emoire era, Medieval era, Industrial Revolution era etc.). Augmented reality technollogy will be employed in this learning process. Children can scan any horizontal surface to place the 3D historical models of those objects, they will also be asked to pickup correct objects corresponding to the era they are in from a given library of objects provided by the game system, once they place all the correct objects on the table, they will unlock next level and proceed with the game.In this process, children will realise that things around them actually don’t always stay immutable as they are when they were born but in constant envolution in history, thus forming a sense of temporality in everything around them.

First Sketch

The initial idea of the project was just to show a series of historical versions of an object for children to compare, the objects were categorized according to the place where they usually belong to, such as living room, bedroom and street.The idea of game didn’t really come into play, the entire projects acts more like an demonstration APP.

Flow Diagram

User Interface Design

Wireframe

Second Sketch

In the second sketch, we narrowed our idea down to table decoration and decided to develop the project into a game which we believe can better raise children’s interests.

The current biggest challange of the project is basically about matching object with particular era, we really want children to actively analyse the characteristics of different objects from different eras before they pick up the objects rather than learn passively by a series of trial and error. The memory formed in the former process is more durable. In this sense, we need to provide some hints for the children to help them making the right choice.

Wireframe

AR application