- Letter Blocks This is an interesting idea! There's a lot of potential for hardware that sits on or around the iPad - this is basically what Darren's stuff does, and Osmo.
I am inspired by some of the early toys/games in this space (this is probably the best example: https://www.google.com/search?q=cars+ipad+game&oq=cars+ipad+game&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2178j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8). There hasn't been much followup work in this space, but it's relatively easy to add conductive tape or whatever onto a block and track it with the iPad.
What I hear in in the student feedback is partly a need for more interesting/engaging activities, regardless of the modality.
- Braille Piano. Seems like it could be fun. I'm always a little skeptical about combining screen readers and music - partly because a lot of the accessible block programming tools that aren't StoryBlocks focus on music - but end up being a lousier programming language than Scratch, and also a lousy musical instrument. Slightly before your time but our work on Bonk was motivated by the same thing (make interesting audio without making a lousy musical instrument) - there's interesting follow-up work here that we haven't yet got to.
But - there is potential here! Again it comes down to having an interesting experience. And for thi
A few other thoughts:
- I think it would be cool to do something with sung lyrics (or poetry or rap) here. This seems hard but I have some ideas on how to do it.
- One thing we talked about a lot re: StoryBlocks was actually generating movies/cartoons instead of songs.
- Another cool piece of tech I have been thinking about is AI Dungeon 2 (https://play.aidungeon.io/) - which uses ML to generate pretty sophisticated stories!
- Meta point re: AI Dungeon 2 is that for this kind of work it's important to keep track of interesting tech that is newly available.
- Collaborative music device Again there's some potential here but I think it needs more detail. What is the experience like? What's the output like?
Makes me think a little of Dropmix: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dropmix
It's interesting to think about cool stuff you could do with giant Braille letters, or having kids be Braille cells, etc.
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Social game I think this is a potentially interesting feature. I could imagine incorporating some of this in writing or storytelling or whatever.
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Card game This reminds me of some of the work in ICT for Development (at CHI and at the ICTD conference) about group learning activities. I bet there's a lot of stuff one could do with the idea of groups of kids doing stuff with cards like this.
Some meta comments:
- Good start! Keep at it. I think you want to aim for a habit of doing about 1 of these per day - which is hard until you actually do it.
- The one topic I have heard a fair amount from you that I think there could be more of here is group collaboration issues. There's some good ideas here but my gut says there is more.
- Over time, the thing that I think is more and more important is the notion of "what's the story?" Basically that, for a product, you often need to balance a lot of different concerns (and are judged based on how you avoid big problems), but for research and ideation you really want to find a theme or element that you're going to focus on, and structure what you do around that core theme. Like if the core theme is collaboration, your story should be all about collaboration, you should try to think of 2-5 ways that you can specifically address collaboration, you make sacrifices to other parts based on these collaboration goals, etc.
- From Amy Hurst I learned the pattern of problem, opportunity, solution, and I think that's a good way to get at the particular story of a project. For whatever you do, there should be a problem that's clearly stated (in the language of users and their goals), an opportunity (what new idea are you bringing to this work? what has changed in the world of technology that suggests there's something new to try?), and the solution (directly in terms of those other things)