Interactive Children's Project Update

Initial drafts of our designs for the different scenes.

Interactive Children's Project Update: 6/29

Vanessa's blog has a video of us conducting research of pop-up books.

Although the books we found weren't exactly examples of the kind of interactions we wanted, nor were they in the form we ultimately decided on, we were able to gain valuable knowledge regarding the aesthetics of our board and how to make it more appealing to our target age group. The materials used in the creation of the pop up books was also indicative of how well the intended interactions were able to be carried out. Books with thinner, lesser quality paper were difficult to maneuver especially with the slide and pull tabs. Books with thicker paper or even cardboard were a lot easier to interact with and therefore more entertaining. This definitely influenced our material choices.

Interactive Children's Project Update: 6/28

We discussed our project further and realized that a story would be more restrictive to interactive experiences. Not only that, we were restricted to only 4 pages for a story which was too difficult, especially for an interactive story. We decided to go with an interactive board and stayed with the fantasy theme and a lady knight. This interactive board would be more of a "create-your-own-story" and less of a sequence of things you have to do in order to get to a certain goal.

Josh worked on designing the initial circuit with one arduino lilypad. As you can see, it was a tight fit and proved difficult to fathom how we would get two different amounts of power from one lilypad.

Interactive Children's Project Update 6/27

Today we worked on figuring out the programming of the microphone and photo resistor. Jessica was able to figure out how to make the photo resistor work while Josh and I had trouble figuring out the microphone programming. We also researched color schemes for our scenes.

Interactive Children's Project Update

Today we discussed in class our next project: an interactive children's project. We decided to go with entertainment and make a 2D storybook with a female knight who is to save a prince from his castle only to find that he's not a cool dude and rides off on a dragon in the end.

We sketched out a couple concept ideas and Vanessa posted on her blog a lot of good examples:

Vanessa's Blog

We want to possibly emulate a sort of hallmark singing/light up cards but require interactions such as sound and touch in order to progress the story and make it come alive.

an example of an interactive art book (even though it is digital, it's a good example of what we want to experiment with physically)

an example of how we could program the sound and lights

an example of touch senors used on fabric as opposed to paper

Project 3: Assignments 1 & 2 Videos

Assignment 1

Assignment 2

Project 3: Assignment 2

Today we were tasked with creating a circuit and program an arduino to make something that's switch was a button clasp. We chose to make a bracelet with an LED in the middle.