Ocean Conijn
World of words
To help childeren with their vocabulairy I’ve created World of Words. It’s an application in which they add words, like a personal dictionairy. They can add words by playing a game, the teacher or lesson methods can add a list for them to practice. This application helps children learn words and meaning, gives teachers insight in their progress and helps researchers by the understanding of how we learn meaning. This project was nomiated at the SpinAwards.
All research is in Dutch.
Question
Combining different user goals
In this project one of the biggest challenges was to combine the user goals of the childeren, teachers and researchers. I created this concept with a school full of childeren, teachers and Driebit.
Research
How do you learn the meaning of a word?
The research started with understanding how you learn the meaning of a word.
The steps are as followed, you get input. You hear the word or maybe read it somewhere. The next time you hear it, you’ll recognize the word. Then you start to connect the word with other words that give them meaning. This is called semantizing the word, it gives the word a place in your structure. After this step you’re ready to use it and get in a feedback loop. In this loop you’re imporving your understanding of the word by input from others.
I’ve mapped this in a journey and then created different methods for the steps in the journey.
How can we help preventing mistakes?
After the first test I’ve found several ways childeren could make mistakes and created different solutions to this problem.
Then I started to test the different methods and the ways of keeping them from making mistakes. During this test I’ve found that they like to chat with each other and making up stories more then the lessons they have now.
How can we use chatting and stories?
In a test at the school I asked them to bring their reading books. They came in chatting when I was preparing the Ipad for testing. Then they made this comment and it made me think. What if I use this
How do we expand aswell as deepen?
After the first test I’ve found several ways childeren could make mistakes and created different solutions to this problem.
Then I started to test the different methods and the ways of keeping them from making mistakes. During this test I’ve found that they like to chat with each other and making up stories more then the lessons they have now.
User Interface
How do we visualize connection of words?
We know a lot of words, really a lot. A 12 year old knows about 10.000 words and visualizing this in a tablet size application needs a lot of thinking.
I like to seek inspiration in other platforms and websites. It helps me to kickstart the ideas.
Then I choose three different ones and added my own content to see if it could work for this type of interface. This helped me to see that a wordweb visualisation, which I found really boring, worked best with the content. Giving me this new challenge, how can I make this application look attractive for 10-12 year olds?
Visual Design
How do we make it look fun?
Childeren find most of the stuff at school dull. I can see what they mean, most of the books and methods that are used have the “we wanted it to be fun for kids”-vibe.
The application had to be used by kids from 8-12. This is a big range and they all like different stuff. So the idea is that the words are ingested by a monster (for the younger kids 8<) and you can easily remove the monster when they don’t like it.
