Interactive Jumping Toy
The brief for this project was to make a new, interactive tangible product. I wanted to design something for a user group I already knew something about: kids with autism, a user group I had worked with for 4 years before I started my design education.
My experience with kids from autism is that they often don’t interact or play with each other because they are on very different language levels. By designing a game that only provides feedback if there is more than one person using it, perhaps the kids would be more motivated to engage with one another.
Project by: Jacob Pettersen
Project length: 8 weeks
AHO course: Tangible Interaction, spring 2015
At The Same Time
The goal of the game is to move towards the centre of the toy. The children need to land on their respective buttons simultaneously in order to continue towards the centre. The centre light blinks when they have successfully landed at the same time.
For this project, I did everything from the coding, to the soldering, to the wool covered buttons wth laser cut LED strips.
The Inspiration
I got many of my insights from this centre for children with autism.
The Idea
I began with early drawings visualizing how I wanted the toy to be interacted with.
Sequence Planning
This is is a sequence drawing where I planned how the interaction would play out. The initial concept had four arms, which I scoped down to two based on the amount of time available to me.
Small Prototype
Using arduino and cardboard, I made a small prototype to test the code and the interaction before making the 1:1 model.
1:1
The rest of the process was mainly building the final model. The biggest challenge was to sort and order all the cables, and to make the jumpable buttons, which I made from a foam material and two metal plates.
