This is a two-week design sprint exercise. We were asked to learn from a historical prototype, discover its overlooked strengths, and use it as a basis for designing a completely new product.

We chose to research and develop Alan Kay's Dynabook.Inspired by the active learning quality of Dynabook which enable children to learn knowledge by programming the computer, we envisioned an AR mobile APP for kids to get closer and learn about nature by capturing and collecting natural assets in the real world, and then learning their relationships in a virtual garden that are designed and built by themselves.

Dynabook, envisioned by Alan Kay in 1968, is a personal computer for children of all ages.

It is a thin, portable computer that was highly dynamic and weighed no more than two pounds. Kay emphasized that child is an active agent, a creator, an explorer, and is far more capable intellectually than is generally supposed. Therefore, he states that we should provide a better “book“ for children with technology, one which is active rather than passive.

Dynabook encourage children to create programmable objects, play with them through a programming language called Smalltalk, and share them on the Internet. Kay had the ambition to redefine the context of how children learn with computer.

This is a two-week design sprint exercise. We were asked to learn from a historical prototype, discover its overlooked strengths, and use it as a basis for designing a completely new product.

We chose to research and develop Alan Kay's Dynabook.Inspired by the active learning quality of Dynabook which enable children to learn knowledge by programming the computer, we envisioned an AR mobile APP for kids to get closer and learn about nature by capturing and collecting natural assets in the real world, and then learning their relationships in a virtual garden that are designed and built by themselves.

We identified the lost values of present pedagogies and educational technologies:

1. For passive learning: a lack of real-time interaction between the material and the learner. This also applies to those close to the active end of the spetrum, as self-directed discoveries do not guarantee feedback from the learning material/environment.

2. For active learning: limited knowledge transfer for virtual interactive mediums like educational games. Learners, particularly children, often find it hard to recontextualize what they experience in the game and fail to effectively apply skills/knowledge to real life scenarios.

3. Overall: Inability to spark and address inquiry-based actions. Without an active human instructor, children can only create very limited inputs for the tool/application and cannot retrieve answers directly relevant to their inquiries.

We decided to use the MR (mixed reality) technology to give children a more immersive learning environment. Before designing our own prototype, we researched existing products.

One inspiring case is Alive Studios Zoo. It brings learning to life through a series of interactive cards with VR anminal characters and English words to awaken excitement and engagement among students.

We follow the card format in the case study, but the relationship between cards and cards could be more complex.

Inspired by Smalltalk, the object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language used in Dynabook, objects can be controlled, influenced, stimulated, and oriented by all kinds of factors. By associating objects with different factors like an effect, a stimuli, or other objects, different results will come out. Children can learn about those phenomena by changing the factors and discovering the results.

What if children can customize the objects with Dynamix Lens? What if the “results” can be displayed in real time by AR/VR technologies?

As hands-on activities can increase engagement and stimulate inquiry-based learning, we decided that all the object cards in the system will be collected by children themselves, by taking pictures of nature, their garden, their home, or their own place. A personal gallery can be built in this way.

Upon building a customized collection of objects, communication, comparison and exchange between individuals will occur. More interesting “chemistries” between objects will come out. Ultimately, the project will become an interrelated community where kids connect and learn from each other.

After getting feedback from in-class peer review, we consolidate our idea into two key features:

1. A magic lens that support children to explore nature actively with engaging learning experience in real time .
2. A magic garden that provide children with a safe and creative learning environment by uncover relationship between objects with experiment (like a personal lab).

In developing our prototype, we constantly checked and questioned if our approach was effective in achieving our goal of inspiring inquiry-based learning. We were careful not to let explicit texts dominate the user’s experience with “Magic Lens” and focused on facilitating the discovery process by offering a graphic menu of commands.

When evaluating our user flow, we met uncertainties on whether to prioritize one of the two features and make one an auxiliary tool that serves the other. Eventually, we as a team agreed that both features should support the upper-level experience and that we should not let one of the features dominate the self-directed learning process.

We also learned that when designing AR applications, it’s important to reach a balance between creating a world full of possibilities and reflecting the richness of reality. This is especially relevant when the design goal is to enable users to learn through interaction and transfer what they learn from the augmented reality to real life.

Given more time, we will make a functional AR prototype and 3D animations to make the demo more realistic. We will also test our concept with real AR development tools and try out how well our design can work with current object recognition technologies.