Dwarfs ערכה חינוכית לילדים

Press Kit

Unique Properties

There are two aspects that the ASD children are not good at, emotion and communication, the product aims to improve the children's social lives by training these two aspects.

The product targets 6 - 12 years old ASD children who are educated in ordinary schools. It involves a playing process with a social worker to educate the children about emotion expression and emotion control. In the process, visual, tactile and auditory sensation of the children will be triggered, so that the children will have more and deeper communication with the social worker instead of only verbal communication, eventually their social skills will be improved.

Dimensions & Packaging

Emoboard: Width 400mm x Depth 400mm x Height 283mm

Each Emobject: About Width 70mm x Depth 70mm x Height 70mm

Tags

autism, education, sensation, communication

Production Technology

In the design, RFID technology is added to complete the auditory stimulation. Also, digital programming of Arduino and Pure Data are also involved.

Design Challenge

The most challenging issue in the project would be the technology part.

RFID technology and digital programming were definitely difficult for a product designer. Therefore, a former IT tutor in Hong Kong Polytechnic University was invited to help with these parts.

Research

A first hand research was conducted in 2018, included observation on some ASD children and an interview with a social worker who was working on some projects about ASD children. The research was to know about what kind of difficulties or issues that the ASD children and social worker face in their usual lives.

A first hand survey was conducted in 2019 in order to collect people's impression on different emotions for the design development. The participants were required to draw the colours and anything that could recall their different emotional memories. 30 people participated in the survey, included adults, children and ASD children.

Inspiration

Under Integrated Education in Hong Kong, some ASD students were being labelled because of their different behaviours, many of them just do not know how to express their feelings and emotions properly. Therefore, this became the starting point of the project.

In the design, different sensations were involved because I took tactile therapy as a reference. It inspired me to arrange stimulation of different sensations so that ASD children will be triggered to have more and deeper communication since some of them are not good at verbal communication.

Project Duration

The project is a Product Design student final year project finished in Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The project started in September 2018 in Hong Kong and finished in May 2019 also in Hong Kong, half of the duration was for research stage, half was for design stage. It was exhibited at the Design Annual Show 2019 in Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Operation Flow

The gaming process is held by a social worker while an ASD child is the participant.

First, the child is required to pick up an Emobject that represents a negative emotion. He has to observe it by eyes, touch it by ears and put it on the Emoboard, the Emoboard will then produce a sound that represents that specific negative emotion. After the whole observation, the child will guess which negative emotion that the Emobject represents. He can check the answers with the answer cards.

After, the child is required to use the observation method mentioned above to guess another Emobject that represents a negative emotion, which can soothe the previous negative emotion. If his answer is correct, he can put the Emobject he chooses on the Emoboard, the sound of Emoboard will slowly change from the negative emotion to the positive one.

The gaming process is to educate ASD children about emotion expression and control.