NUMBUDDY: Smart Interactive Design for Children with Developmental Dyscalculia
Embodied Interaction, Cognitive Science, Smart Interactive Design
Project Overview
Positioning:
A smart interactive product combining software and hardware, designed based on theories from cognitive psychology and educational psychology, aiming to provide a personalized and embodied learning experience.
Key Insight:
Traditional intervention methods often suffer from low effectiveness, poor scalability, and lack of personalized feedback. This project leverages smart interactive design to compensate for the current deficiencies in embodied perception and theoretical guidance within existing therapeutic approaches.
Research Work
The product design is rigorously grounded in scientific research to ensure the effectiveness and targeting of the intervention.
Theoretical Review: Systematically collected and organized research on dyscalculia from cognitive psychology (e.g., spatial-numeric mapping, numerical representation deficits) and educational psychology. Deeply analyzed the characteristics of Developmental Dyscalculia and the neuropsychological issues of the target group (e.g., DD children's difficulties with number magnitude comparison and quantity estimation) to provide theoretical support for the design.
Research Gap: Identified a common gap in the current field: the lack of interactive learning products that effectively integrate embodied cognition theory with real-time, personalized feedback.
Design Principles: Extracted core design principles specifically for children with DD, emphasizing multi-modal perception, embodied operations, and graduated difficulty adjustment.
Product Design and Interaction Innovation
Our designed smart interactive product, NUMBUDDY, innovatively integrates a digital application (App) with physical hardware, offering a learning environment that is narrative-driven and provides emotional support.
Narrative Drive: Uses the story of a "Captain" navigating a ship through a storm as the backdrop (preventing the ship from being imbalanced), transforming abstract math calculations into concrete tasks of balance and weight distribution, thus motivating the children.
Software-Hardware Integration:
App (Software): Provides task scenarios, difficulty selection (e.g., within 5, within 10), calculation guidance, and personalized performance recording.
Hardware (Physical): Designed an operable ship model or balance scale (e.g., indicating added weight by moving a mast or placing weights). Children must calculate the value on the App and then perform an embodied operation on the physical hardware to "balance" the ship.
Core Interaction: Moves away from traditional click-based exercises, encouraging children to establish a connection between abstract numbers and embodied spatial operations (e.g., weight, distance, balance). This is crucial for helping children with DD form correct numerical representations.
Visualization Feedback: The App's main page features a Personal Archive and a Review Module that records performance scores, duration, and operation counts. It also allows for the review of instantaneous changes caused by decisions made during an archival session, helping both the child and parent track progress and optimize future decisions.
Core Value
This project is not just a product design; it is a practical application that translates rigorous scientific theory into a human-centered solution:
Theory to Practice: Successfully translated theoretical models of DD from cognitive psychology into an operational and verifiable smart interactive design.
Embodied Cognition: Through the software-hardware integration, it provides children with DD a scarce market offering of embodied learning, helping them build a correct sense of number magnitude.
Social Impact: Dedicated to improving the quality of life and educational equity for a specific population group through design, embodying the philosophy of Inclusive Design.
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