Playground

The user filling in a new entry for the scrapbook in AR
The user exploring an educational world in VR

🌳 Briefly describe your project in relation to the challenge prompt

Playground is designed to be an interactive augmented reality (AR) interface to actively provide educational opportunities, an outlet of creativity and a source of connection between children of incarcerated parents and their parents.

2.7 million children in the U.S. have a biological parent in jail and 45% of them are around the age of 10, causing huge impacts on their educational, social, and emotional growth as parent-child relationships play a major role in these developments. Our design solution, Playground, aims to foster consistent and meaningful communication between these children and their incarcerated parents; to increase accessibility and allow for these parents to be more involved in the child’s development.

Our approach to this problem is to provide tailored AR “worlds” for the child and parent to explore and learn in. The child and parent would lay out educational goals before entering the world and reflect of their experience afterwards. This not only increases the child’s educational knowledge with the guidance of their parent, but also teaches them the value skills of reflection and gratitude through a creative outlet of scrapbooking.

🖌️ Describe your main design decisions and how they contribute to your product

Design Decisions

From our analysis, we uncovered that children with incarcerated parents “score lower on tests compared to single-parent household children”, according to the US Department of Education. In addition, the University of Notre Dame claims that “Children of incarcerated parents fall behind in reading comprehension … have poor attention spans”. To these ends, our team sought to target lower academic performances by allowing students to learn with their incarcerated parents.

Our initial attempt to address this issue involved a VR experience with educational mini games designed to be led by the parents, aiming to strengthen intellectual development. However, user testing revealed a flaw – the focus on parent-led teaching felt overly instructional and neglected the importance of building a strong parent-child bond.

This feedback led us to shift our approach. Further research highlighted the significant impact incarceration has on a child's social/emotional well-being. These children often experience difficulties with communication skills, making friends, and face a higher risk of developing mental illness/substance abuse.

As a result, we've redesigned our VR experience. Now, where parents and children are encouraged to converse and learn together through related prompts in a game-like setting. To solidify these shared experiences, the VR platform includes a scrapbook feature to document their memories through creative expression – free writing, photography, and drawing.

Playground, our AR/VR platform, acknowledges the complex challenges faced by children with incarcerated parents. Our goal is to provide them with a tool that builds strong relationships, and supports learning despite the difficulties they face.

Design System

We chose Nunito for its playful roundedness, ideal for our 10-14 year old audience. To achieve AR standards, we used neutral colors for our educational graphics to pop, avoiding cognitive overload. Our components/icons have rounded edges for a friendly look, to encourage and empower users.