My StoryBuddy

Give your child the gift of language with our app's carefully designed games and activities that are based on the latest research in early childhood development.

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Inspiration

Limited access to high-quality educational resources during and after the pandemic widened the educational gap and literacy issues among children, especially those from low-socioeconomic families. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), only one-third of 10-year-olds worldwide possess the ability to read and understand a written story. In addition, 64% of these children failed to meet the minimum proficiency in reading comprehension, up from 52% before the pandemic. The global K-12 education market was valued at $103.5 billion in 2021 and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 17.7% from 2022 to 2031, reaching $525.7 billion by 2031.

What it does

My StoryBuddy is a language-learning iPad application for children aged 3-5 years old. It provides a fun and engaging learning experience with a focus on storytelling through learning new vocabulary, creating stories, and developing reading comprehension. The main goal is to allow children the ownership and autonomy to develop these skills through playful learning.

How we built it

We utilized our skills in UX Research and UX Design to create a prototype in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

  • Trying to understand children’s cognitive and physical capabilities as well as descoping the problem space. Designing for children involves different principles than designing for adults since children are the users but not the customers (parents). This is a huge field of research so we had to quickly narrow our focus.
  • Originally, we wanted to incorporate AR designs in our solution. However, we quickly realized with the time constraints and our limited knowledge of AR designs that we do not have the skill set to complete the prototype successfully. We considered unconventional ways for children to learn such as an AI mascot and online learning curriculums.
  • Learning simple animation tools to prototype animated videos and text-to-voice features. We tried a few software but were unable to figure out how to incorporate them into Figma.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Learning and discovering new tools to assist our design process more effectively
  • Collaborating on a project and implementing design changes quickly
  • Figuring out how to design for kids!

What we learned

  • Collaborating with others during a hackathon
  • Using research to support design decisions
  • Rapid prototyping
  • Designing for kids
  • Pivoting ideas

What's next for My StoryBuddy

  • Do usability testing with kids to gain insights and understand where we can improve our designs
  • Conduct more user research and design the parent interface where parents can monitor, set preferences and learn more about virtual learning experiences for their children. We acknowledge that parents play a critical part in their child’s learning journey.
  • Incorporate more diverse learning activities and games such as a movement feature where kids take a screen break, voice recording tool, story narration, and mascot audio guidance to create a holistic learning experience (to name a few)
  • Increase accessibility through the integration of text-to-speech, image-to-speech, and video modeling for children with specific learning difficulties
  • Add collaboration features for children to share their learning with others

Built With

  • figma
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