Negotiabbles Tablet App

The Emotional Periodic Table emerged from a key insight during our research. We found that negotiation is not only about emotions, but also about the tension created when different perspectives, needs, and communication styles interact. Across different individuals and cultures, people often negotiate in very different ways, yet many are unaware of how their words, tone, or actions are actually perceived by others.This led us to ask a fundamental question: how can we make these invisible dynamics visible? We wanted children to not only recognize their own feelings, but also understand the emotional impact of their behavior and the shifting tension within a conversation. Through multiple rounds of exploration, we discovered that color, shape, and motion could work together as a shared visual language. Colors represented emotional states and intensity, shapes reflected communication patterns, and motion visualized how interactions evolved over time.The breakthrough was realizing that negotiation could be taught through visualization rather than explanation. The Emotional Periodic Table became a system for making emotions, intentions, and interpersonal dynamics tangible. By helping children see what is normally invisible, the experience encourages greater self-awareness, empathy, and understanding of how their choices influence others during a negotiation. At the same time, transforming these abstract social dynamics into colorful, interactive visual elements makes the learning process more fun, engaging, and approachable for young learners.

Negotiabbles addresses the gap by replacing passive learning with active, voice-driven practice. Most Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) tools teach children about emotions through videos or multiple-choice scenarios. Negotiabbles puts children inside a real conversation where their words have immediate, visible consequences, combining AI role-play, real-time emotion visualization, and fairytale distancing, in a way no existing tool does. What truly differentiates us is the emotion visualization system. Rather than labeling feelings with text or static icons, we built a living visual language where warm colors and angular shapes signal tension, while cool tones and rounded forms communicate calm. Children absorb it intuitively through play, without instruction.This was confirmed powerfully during usability testing. The moment that surprised us most was watching children spontaneously narrate the emotion bubbles mid-conversation, pointing at the screen and saying "see, he's getting angry now," accurately reading emotional states through color and shape alone, before we had explained the system at all. We expected to guide children through the visual language. Instead, they taught themselves. It revealed something that has since shaped our broader thinking: Children engage far more deeply when emotions have a visible and concrete form rather than remaining abstract beyond their reach.

The voice-first decision was both pedagogical and deeply human. Negotiation is a spoken, real-time skill, and teaching it through taps or text would be like teaching someone to swim without water. When a child speaks aloud to advocate for themselves, they practice the real cognitive and emotional experience of finding words under pressure, regulating tone, and responding to another voice, which is exactly what they need in a playground dispute or classroom disagreement.One of the design challenges we faced was handling silence and hesitation. When a child freezes mid-conversation, that moment carries real emotional weight. In peer interactions, silence can feel like failure, and we couldn't let the app replicate that. Our solution was to deploy AI as a sensitive, in-the-moment guide. When hesitation is detected, the AI character offers a gentle contextual nudge like "how about asking why they feel that way?", keeping the conversation alive without breaking immersion or undermining the child's sense of agency.The feedback loop is deliberately multi-sensory: the AI responds verbally, emotion bubbles shift in real time, and on-screen captions support younger readers, delivering emotional, auditory, and visual feedback simultaneously. Across the K–8 range, the system scales with the child. Younger learners receive shorter exchanges and more frequent prompts, while older children navigate complex scenarios with greater nuance and less scaffolding.