dotdot

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  Title menu

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  Main interaction component

Inspiration

We started off by agreeing that we wanted to create both a fun and helpful application for autistic children. Not having known anything about autistic children, we researched a little bit about the different ways in which they perceive colors and movement. According to TIME magazine, despite the significance movement plays in their lives, autistic children often struggle with movement control. Color also often plays a very different role in their lives. While color is usually considered an adjective, simply a description of an object, to many autistic children, colors often times are objects themselves. We combined the two concepts in our project to encourage autistic children to not only refine their perception of color, but also strengthen their movement control by associating their movement with a color matching exercise through a mobile application.

What it does

Our application meant to let you play and experience color through movement. To do this, the user can tilt and move a black dot to encounter other colored dots to change the background color of the game. The objective is to match the center rectangle’s color by colliding with the correct colored dot. Try to keep a streak with how many color matches you accurately make, between the colored dots and the colored center rectangle!

How we built it

We used Unity2D, which uses C#.

First, we brainstormed potential ideas that would fit our inspiration, while taking into account time constraints. To learn more about educational and therapeutic exercises that already exist, we researched various types of non-mobile activities on Pinterest and other sites to see how much what we can incorporate into a mobile app. We used online documentation to help us learn Unity, watching YouTube videos and experimenting with implementations and scripts. Then, through coordinating efforts through Git, we worked on individual components and pieced them together on Unity.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was only just introduced to Unity, with all of us learning everything right on the spot. This means that we looked up everything we needed to implement the game, and we needed to simplify what our end goal was as much as possible in order to produce a finished product. We definitely made use of the mentors at SDHacks. Simply put, they are amazing. Essentially, the whole process of learning Unity was a great learning curve, but we are so proud that we learned so much and have something to show.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned how to use (and how hard it is to develop for) a leapmotion Scrapped a project we realized was too big for us to complete/learn about in time and managed to come back and finish an application with a real idea. Learned to use Unity/C# Learned a little bit of how it feels to dev for Android Teamwork

What we learned

Struggling is just part of the process! No one is perfect right off the bat, so we just have to keep moving forward. We also learned some basics of Unity.

What's next for dotdot

Emotions and empathy are abstract, difficult to teach concepts that many autistic people struggle to grasp. The intention of dotdot was originally to be a music+color+emotion application that autistic children could use to get more exposure to understanding how feelings work. There are several studies that have shown how autistic children are often more receptive to music as opposed to speak, in fact it’s quite common for them to learn to sing before they learn to speak. We intend to take dotdot and turn it into a music application where each color represents a sort of feeling or emotion, such as red=passion/love, blue=sad, yellow=exciting/pumped, green=relaxed, and playing different songs. The player should then listen to the song and move the ball to whatever color they feel suits the song’s emotion the best. We will not tell them that their answer is right or wrong, rather we will display a quick shot of how many users have previously selected the same color for a certain song. The idea is not to dictate how autistic children interpret music nor is it to force them to feel emotions that they cannot, as neither of these goals are necessarily conducive to their development. The goal is to just give them a general idea of empathy and how feelings are communicated through a medium that conveys emotions very clearly. We want to give children a better idea of how other people as a majority feel about certain things, as well as allow children to express their own feelings and opinions as well.

Built With

• unity