Say hi to John McCann

John McCann is five years old and lives with his parents in Birmingham. His father, Tom, is a pollice officer and his mother, Maria, is an artist.

John is a student at Pascal Junior School and he is considered to be a very bright student with lots of potentials. A few months ago he won the first place in a painting contest in his class. Apparently he has a raw painting talent inherited from his mother. Maria has high hopes for her son and strongly insists that in a couple of years his age would be ideal for his talent to be matured through private lessons. However, John's father argues that his son should get into sports as every normal child at his age does. Johns' parents have reached to an agreement to let him decide in the near future.

During the weekends, John spends a lot of his time with his cousin who lives right next door. His aunt is helping them to improve their spelling and to learn new words because she believes that schools do not do a satisfying job. On the other hand, his uncle always labels her as a perfectionist and suggests giving the kids more playing time with other kids in the neighbourhood for shaping a normal social life.

John has never raised any problems at his home. He is a very kind child, never lies and always does what he is told to by his parents. He even helps his parents with the housework.

Everybody meet Emma Goodfella

Little Emma is 5 years old and she lives at Birmingham with her parents. Emma's father is a businessman and he travels a lot. Her mother is a house-wife and most of the times she is at home.

Emma attends a private school at Sutton Coldfield. She is a good student and well behaved. She is trying to learn how to spell and write. Emma likes to dance to the beat of music and play with her dolls. Her favourite colour is pink and she loves wearing dresses and trying on her mothers make up.

Emma wants to go to dance lessons but her mother disagrees and she wants her to learn to play the piano instead. Emma misses her father as most days he is away or late at the office. She would like to spend more time with him.

Emma likes her room to be tidy and everything at its place. When she finishes playing with her dolls she puts everything back at its place. She likes to go to her fathers office and pretend to be her secretary. She often tries to write him letters or make him drawings and puts them on his desk to read them.

Initial Requirements

The pen must be designed around the target audience; children. The first thing that children in the age of 4-6 notice is how appealing an object is to them. So the first thing that must be taken into consideration is the physical design of the object. It must be as attractive to the children as possible. This means the use of bright colours, funny images and attractive design. If the object fails to get their attention from the first time they see it, they may neglect it and possibly never use it.

The final product must also be as user friendly as possible. It must not be difficult to use, as children will not have the patience and/or ability to lean how complicated products work. It must have as few buttons as possible as children may not remember what button is for, even if it’s labelled with descriptive labels and signs. The ideal number of buttons for this product must be just one. Also most of the communication must be done using voice recognition and speech synthesis, since children of that age group will find it difficult to read instructions from displays.

An LCD screen might also be used to display currently used words and/or display the letters that must be written down at any instance. The screen must act as a supplementary means of communication and not the primary one.

The motion sensing capabilities of the product must also be designed so as to distinguish between ambiguous motions. This is crucial as children that just start to learn how to write, have difficulties writing their first letters and even getting used to holding a pen or pencil.

The shape of the pen must also be designed around small hands. It must be as comfortable as possible for small children to hold and use. It must not be designed however around only left handers or right handers. Both types of users must be able to use the same product. This is one very important feature that must be taken into consideration before the actual design process takes place. Also it must feature a non-slip surface so that children with sweaty hands will not have any difficulties using it.

Safety issues must also be addressed before the design stage. The product must not in any way be dangerous to children. It must not feature any sharp edges that might hurt them. The tip of the pen can be made retractable, so it will be safe when it’s not used. Also no electrical parts must be exposed, to prevent short-circuits.

Background research

Before we begin creating the personas, we conducted a small background research to see exactly which groups of children would be the potential users of our product.

The typical age that children begin to understand letters and numbers is 4-5 years old. At kindergarden, children learn how to draw letters and numbers by joining dots and lines together with the help of their teachers. This is their first step to letter recognition and understanding. At this stage teachers can read a book to them and give emphasis to the image than the text in order to help children express their oral skills.

At reception children learn how to "create" words by joining letters together (5 years old). They learn how to write their names and some simple words like “mum”, “dad”, “dog”, “cat” etc. At this stage children are ready to start writing numbers and letters. They can see a letter or number and copy it without following any lines or dots. Teachers give emphasis to the text rather than the picture helping children to recognize sounds in words. In addition children are encouraged to find specific sounds in the words.

The difference between the first class of the primary school and the reception class is that in reception they give emphasis to the sound of a specific letter rather than to spell the specific letter. They are trying to write words using the sound of the letters. This helps them to put letter ”sounds” together to shape a word or a small phrase. This is the area where the most difficulties of this age are raised. Children confuse sounds, which most of the times is different from the letter as appeared in the alphabet. Apart from this, the most familiar problem children face are for example the way children hold the pencil. In addition more extraordinary cases include children that confuse the letters, write them in the wrong way or the other way round. In addition instead of reading a book starting from left to right, they start from right to left. Some of these symptoms are normal but there are occasions where this can be characterized as dyslexia.

On the other hand children introduction to numbers is easier. The majority of children are more acquainting to numbers than to letters. This is explained with the fact that children from very young age start count their fingers. At this age children need help from teachers and from parents. Research shows that children who have additional help from their parents at home can improve more than those who haven’t.

Initial ideas

We held a brainstorming session to come up with several ideas about the project. Some of them were not that great, but nevertheless contributed to the final decision to be made. The initial ideas were as follows:

• An anti gravity chair that would help old people move around easily without steps or any other obstacles getting in their way.
• An operating system with suitable applications that small children can use and understand easily.
• A motion tracking pen that helps children to spell.
  

After much talk, we decided to stick with the third idea. The idea is to have a motion tracking pen that spells out words spoken to it. The pen spells out a letter at a time and waits for the user to write a letter. If the letter written is the correct one, the pen will spell out the next letter in the word. If the letter is not the correct one, the pen will prompt the user to write it again. It is aimed towards small children that just learn to spell.