Pubby
It is an intuitive platform, to understand “life skills” in a remote situation using storytelling and role playing as content and puppet as a medium to interact.
• As the attention span of a child in preoperational child is very less. I tried to strengthen it by involving child’s hand (physical - puppets) and heart (emotional - stories) both. These stories could either be told by the children or narrated by the system. The story is designed in such a way that it triggers actions and reactions of a child through the input device as puppets.
• I explored the cooperation in sync with multiple virtual characters, environments, and physical toys in form of various puppets to tell a story together with a child. Understanding and analyzing child’s environment and willingness to utilize the new media, which gave us opportunity to emotionally, cognitively and physically engage the child to play and learn.
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Learning experience:
The learning experience should be such that it engages attentively. By understanding that children get involved with their toys while playing with them actively which involves physical and emotional activity.
Similarly when a child listens to a story he/she get involved emotionally. They place them in the story and imagine. They get involved fully. Every feeling and emotion influences child’s mind to react or feel. The stories have the framework of problem solving situations in imaginary world. To explain them consequences, situations stories have been used. If a child is put in a situation he or she will find out solution to where there problem.
Keeping these assumptions in mind the content – story will be build.
Character design and story boarding:
There were multiple story boards.
• The narratives are designed in such a way that it questions the child’s intention or action instead of giving or teaching them the right answers. The story is a modular tree format where there is no right or wrong direction; instead there is always a choice to be made, every action resulting in a react ion. The child understands and grasps the concept easily as it has a direct implementation in the real world.
• After understanding that since childhood, most of the adults don’t give a chance for child to think or trust the child to make his or her own decision, as they don’t want them to fail. Instead of giving child to assess the situation or a question or understand, he is provided with a readily right answer. This leads in weaker decision-making.
• To omit this traditional approach and build in better decision-making, the child has to face certain situation and certain questions, which challenges him cognitively to think and react. This helps him practice the real life situation that he may face. This is a different approach to let the child realize right and wrong in a society, life skills, problem solving, being imaginative and creative in a given situation.
• As through puppets and story we have already engaged the child’s heart and hand; through these decision-making questions/choices the child’s head/mind also gets involved. Basically trying to engage child in all possible ways in a play activity.
• The real hand puppets have a virtual representation in the virtual environment as a character. The actions the child makes the hand puppet does, the same is imitated by virtual cartoon character on the screen. This gives a sense of achievement to the child, as he is able to see the result of his role playing activity. This extends to audio feedback; character on screen behaves like a puppet of voice input, if the child gives a voice command the character will follow that as well.
Types of puppet:
There are different variations of hand puppets broadly they can be categorized in 3 categories. Mouth opening, head nodding with the hand movement and finger puppets. This categorization is necessary as it helps in identifying what kind of technology has to be derived. As in different puppets different number of finger motions are needed.
Video Final PUBBY scenario:
