What is the problem?
How might we make a learning experience more exciting and useful for children?
What is the solution?
Create an educational toy robot. It will help to keep kids engaged, create a structure for the studying process, and turn a boring lesson into an engrossing experience.
Tools
Figma
Illustrator
Miro
Photoshop
After Effect
Skills
UX Research
UX/UI Design
Conversational Design
Video Production
Team
Ana Bungag
Danika Servin
Timeline
01.2022 - 03.2022
or 10 weeks
Users and audience
There is a pretty specific age gap when children can productively interact with robots. They shouldn’t be too young because in this case, they won’t understand all the robot functions, but at the same time shouldn’t be too old because then they just won’t be interested in when the robot teaches them something. For the secondary audience: parents should have control over the toy.
Primary audience
Children of 5-8 years
Secondary audience
Their parents, relatives
Design thinking process
Emphasize
Children fall in love with robots because of the bots’ ambiguous nature between animate and inanimate, relative autonomy, responsive yet with a mind of their own, and singular personality
Existing mental model of how children learn, plus children's psychology
For creating a good productive and useful toy we needed to understand the basics, namely how to understand how children's brains and psychology work and how kids share learning and using these particular qualities.
Children’s learning process findings
Different kids turned more to different learning styles:
- Visual
- Auditory
- Reading and writing
- Kinesthetic
Children learn best when:
- Use tech-empowered learning tools and computational environments
- Take active roles of designers and builders
- Do it in a social setting, with mentors and coaches and networks
Important findings about children’s behavior and brain development
- Capturing children’s attention is critical for the learning process
- Play is central to learning for children ages 3 through 11
- Play provides the opportunity to explore the world, interact with others, express and control emotions, develop symbolic and problem-solving abilities, and practice emerging skills
Summary
- Robots are a great tool for educating kids.
- Children are naturally inventive and open. They find the combination of part-machine, part-human both enchanting and liberating.
- Hands-on learning: learn by doing. They have to create, inquire and play in order to test their own knowledge.
- The best age when kids effectively learn from a robot is between 5 and 9. Children below the age of 5 have short attention spans and have problems with remembering newly constructed knowledge. Children above 9 prefer to lead a game and build a robot rather than learn something from them.
- To keep kids engaged during learning process the robot should have some personality and give an emotional response to a child.
Survey
To get quantitative data we created a survey for parents. The main goal was to understand how educational processes look in different families. According to 35 responses, parents need to have a structure of teaching processes, prepared programs and adapted materials for the best success. They are usually willing to try a voice command toy.
Kids like animals, science, space, and math. Their favorite toys are dolls, plushies, Legos, and cars.
Main problems with toys:
- Have small details that are easy to break
- Have limited functionality
- Kids get bored quickly
Summary
From this survey, we discovered that most parents use different kinds of technology to help their children with their education. Parents are willing to try out a voice command toy for their children, however, most of the children learn a lot visually and physically. As far as subjects they like to learn, STEM subjects have been the popular choice. For extracurricular activities, we’ve noticed that physical activities like sports and dance are what children like to do.
Interview
For better understanding parent’s needs, pain points and desires we decided to conduct a user interview with Azel, a math teacher and school principal with thirty-eight years of experience, and mom of Mirac, 9 years old.
Robot is a gadget. Gadgets should be limited for kids because they bad for brain development.
If I had a learning robot toy, I would like it to teach me math and science!
Summary
Findings
- Parent control up to 6
- Consider multiple learning models
- Robots should learn something connected with science or simple cognitive development
- The company that made this product must be trustful and the software well build
Pain points
- Robots are gadgets, should be limited
- They take away opportunity to interact with real world
- Kid’s brains too complicated and unstable to be entrusted to the Robot teacher
Define
User persona
Based on our previous research, we created user personas.
Marketing analysis
Learning toys are usually divided into 3 main categories: multi-learning, entertaining, and engineering. Our robot should be a fusion of the entertaining and engineering categories. The average price for this kind of robots is around $80 and it means that our robot should be available to people with medium and high incomes. It means it should use approachable materials and technologies.
MSCW prioritization
To prioritize product needs and constraints, we did a MSCW Prioritization.
The toy must include:
Visual
Bright, Friendly,
Well-built, Hard to break,
Attracts the attention of children
Hardware
Speaker,
Microphones,
Physical control buttons
Software
Voice Commander,
Child speech analyzer,
Application for parents
Settings
Parental control
Language settings
Simple instructions for use
After filling MOSCW prioritization matrix we formulated the main brand pillars:
Final solution for a robot
Several programs
- Learning activities mixed with physical activities
- Can answer all "Why?" questions during interaction with a child
Learning process
Structured learning programs, perfect for children's development:
- Learning to read
- Bed time reading
- Playing imaginary games
Safety
- Well-built, hard to break
- Parent control
- Kid’s attention
- Bright, friendly design
- Emotional response to interaction with kids
Welcome Tomo - your reliable best friend!
Ideate
Scenario script
To start our script, we looked for some inspiration from famous kids' shows.
Interesting findings:
- Sage of simple words or questions
- Words that rhyme
- Alliterations: “No, smoosh, smash!”
- Musical numbers that are also interactive
- Interactive/participative phrases: “We’ve got to work together”, “Help us bring the sunshine back”
- Encouraging words: “We can do it together”, “We did a great job”
- Being relatable: “I like that too!”
Voice flow
To design voice interaction, we created 3 basic scenarios for each of the programs: a game, bedtime stories, and learning to read. Then we put the scripts into a voice flow interface program that can simulate a conversation by recognizing the speech and walking through the implemented script.
User flow for App
One of the most important things for parents is to have access to the learning process of their children. We decided to solve this problem by making an App that parents can use to control Tomo.
Mockup concept
For visual appearance of Tomo we followed the next principles:
- Bright, friendly, attracts the attention of children
- Well-built, hard to break
- Screened to express emotions
Prototype
App
Progress
Using accompanying mobile App for Tomo parents can check their kids progress.
Programs
Parents can choose a program which will determine how Tomo will interact with a child. App has a reading library that parent can use. Users can also add their own books.
Customization
Parents can customize Tomo to their own and their child specific needs or preferences.
Physical mockup
We finalized visual design for Tomo and made a physical mockup from clay. Once we got the final concept, we created several color options for kids to choose which one they like best.
Test
We conducted usability testing. User didn’t have any problems with navigating inflow.
It’s really funny! The toy and voice are so cute!
Production
For the filming, we made a toy mockup, storyboard and made a video based on it. For the final part, we added animation.
Storyboard
Promo video
Reflections
I really enjoyed this project because it blends unique fields of playfulness and innovative technologies. Initially our team had really superficial knowledge about voice AI and children learning psychology. Through deep research and close collaborative and analytical work we created a toy prototype that can satisfy both parent’s and children’s need sand make their life more exiting and better.
Takeaways
User research helps to look at different points on things, that you can consider as obvious.
The ideas are not always what they seem.
One of our initial ideas that we gravitated more towards was a toy that teaches kids emotional regulation. We were thinking that this is a really good idea that is widely populated in parent society. But research and interviews with real people shows that it can be an interesting concept, but parents probably won’t buy a robot that learns kids’ emotions. It just sounds unsafe and too “mechanical” for them.
Making a physical prototype is challenging.
When you are dealing with something new such as a new software or art materials, expect unexpected troubles and multiple iterations. Our toy mockup was made from clay and we needed to rebuild it multiple times and search for last-minute fixes, supplies from renovation and art stores.
Future exploration
In future iterations of the Tomo toy, we want to continue building customer experience, voice flow and have more user-testing sessions with mockup.
- Building customer experience: package
- Voice flow: develop voice flow scenario to several scripts
- Further develop app and smart animate
