LEMEO: an educational toy
As an early projects at IT Product development, we were tasked to design a piece of educational technology. We were free to pick the students age and subject. My group and I wanted to challenge ourselves and set out to explore 4th grade english. We were fortunate enough to get in contact with a curious teacher who allowed us to observe an english class and later return to evaluate the product with them.
This is a walkthrough of the steps we took and the solution we made.
Observations
Step 1 was to get to know our subjects. The teacher allowed us to observe two lessons in which were able to note specific observations and sketch setups. Afterwards the findings were compared and a set of goals for the design was found: it should be collaborative, adaptable and engaging.
Playing
Up next: start playing with anything and everything we could find. Especially a couple of foam blocks and post-its caught our interest and we would invent game after game with them.
Concept prototype
We settled on an arrow shape to illustrate the words being in sequential order. To explore the value of this design, we built a quick version from cardboard. It would include a screen on each side to depict a word and by flipping the box the word would change. The student would be provided a phrase to complete grammatically correct with the boxes.
Polished prototype
The final prototype was made from a 3d printed skeleton with acrylic panels to allow the students to see the technology inside and allow the light to be visible from the sides.
To make the system cloud based, we designed a website which would allow the students (admittedly students slightly older than fourth grade) to make their own word combinations. The cloud based element was a course requirements, so to help the students as much as possible we included elaborate supportive grammatical explanations.
Getting inspired
To get inspired on educational technology we got creative and not only consulted existing literature and systems, but also explored design exhibits and interactive museum designs.
Explorations
With the boxes as the basic, we started exploring different shaped and the capabilities of these shapes.
Initial usertest
We got a chance to chance to test the system with a single student, but quickly found that more support was needed to inform about correct combinations. We thus altered the design to include magnets to have the boxes be attracted to each other with correct combinations, as well as include LEDs to display green as soon as the correct word was found.
Final usertest
We were able to return to the school and evaluate with four students from the class. They all expressed enjoying the boxes a lot and wanted to continue playing with them. The website was very boring to them. After the evaluation they enthusiastically showed off the prototypes to the rest of the students and taught them how to use the boxes.
