For My final assignment in BBA I really want to put together something memorable. As before I want to keep it simple and engaging, but I want technology to drive its design. So far I've been playing around with a number of things. My goal is to reuse the toy blocks that I made in our last project to continue to define a toolkit for spelling, reading, and word recognition. How far this goes, is still up for discussion...

The above Idea is a somewhat of a smartbox. Here, kids could learn to type, they could work on their writing skills, and they could have a holder for all of there spelling needs in one location. I think it would be really cool to have a toolkit such as this that grows with the user, but I don't think the design is really that engaging. To be honest its way to cluttered and has too much stuff all over the place. 

This design is more of a smart box, whereby students could write and the screen would recognize their writing. I don't think I have enough technical skills to do this, but a smart reader, again, has been done before and could be replaced by so many other impressive toolkits. iPad and iPhone apps do just this and they take years of iteration and development to just get right. But, it seems that I did hit the nail on the head with some sort of recognition system and I continued to explore that idea further. 

Below is my idea for a smart table. Simply it is a wooden table with clear acrylic on top and a video camera below it. In class we learned about Tuio processing and recognition with feducials, so I could use these on the back of my blocks to have the camera recognize them. From there the camera could see what letters were spelt and reference them against a dictionary to see if the words were spelt correctly. 

The system, outlined below, seemed easy enough, yet engaging. I was excited that it had so much promise while being just technically easy enough to that I could create it. Having not much experience in development I know that my limited Java skills would be put to the test, but I was confident that I could make it work. 

With my initial design in mind I spent the week crafting a box for my blocks (below) and playing around with names (above). I really think, if built, this tool had a significant space in the marketplace and could grow to a wide array of applications. From word recognition, this could expand into grammar skills, visual prompts, interactive computer games...the possibilities of the code were endless as long as the feducial system worked. In addition I think that it integrated technology and visual learning with the tactile learning that most kids start out with. Computer spelling programs of today are great for kids, but they are not as tactile as schools would hoped. Tactile tools, on the other hand, are great for kids, but they can not grow and scale as the kids learn more in a way that technology can. This way I have integrated both of these desires into a dual system that is open sourced to expansion and growth. 

So lets see what happens, I have a solid idea and plans in the works. Knowing myself, I'm going to throw myself into the challenge before further assessing weather this is viable or not. I constantly learn through experience so if I fail, I can recognize it immediately, and use what I have learned to go on to the next thing. Ha ha, I'll need a little of luck, but it seems that plans are well underway....

To be continued...