Final Project Idea Brainstorm

For our final project, we will be designing products that would improve classroom experience with very young children, mostly between 2 to 5 years old. Some of the problems that caught my eyes include helping children to stay on their matt, reminding children to keep water in the water tank, and controlling noise level. Before we start talking about ideas, here are a few things we should pay attention to.

• Positive reinforcement is preferred. This means that children should be rewarded for good behaviors as opposed to punished for bad behaviors.
• We must make sure that children will not be intrigued by outputs caused by actions that should be discouraged and instead become encouraged to repeat unwanted actions.

Here are a few of my ideas. Keep in mind that these are very basic ideas and would need more elaboration on specifics.

1. Keeping children on the matt

I want to put touch sensors on the matt. I will use a few so that as long as the child is partially on the matt, the sensor will be triggered. This allows children to have a little more room to move around the matt, so that they don't have to stay completely still the whole time.

My idea of positive reinforcement is to have a smiley face attached to the matt. When the child is on the matt, i.e. touch sensor is activated, the face would smile. Once the child leaves the matt, the face would turn into a crying face. This would be a bang bang control.

2. Keeping water in the tank

I'm imagining using the ultrasonic sensor or some sensor that senses water pressure. The sensors will be able to tell how high the water is. When there is enough water in the tank, a flower will blossom. Once the water goes below a certain level, the flower would wilt.

3. Monitoring noise level

This one is rather hard. I imagine that when kids are loud, they would not pay much attention to visual cues. However, we do not want to cause extra noise in the room with audio cues. Again, since we do not want to accidentally encourage children to make more noises, we would need some visual sources that show things children prefer. This visual cue would change into less preferable signs when the noise passes a certain level. We can do the basic traffic lights, which would stay green at a certain noise level, but then turn yellow and red at higher levels. I may also consult professionals to see if other visual cues would work better for children.