At the end of our holiday break, we hosted a meeting at the university study rooms to go over our research, materials and begin making our presentation. Myself, Hannah, Maria and Vivienne attended the meeting for 4 hours. This was a key meeting as we finalized many of our design outcomes, visual aesthetics and discussed our contextual knowledge on a deeper, more focussed level.

I spent the second week of holiday doing research into the psychology of children, and the ways that colour can effect their learning. I will touch on this research further into this post.

NOTES – from meeting 10/04/21

Our project is aimed towards the age demographic of 5-10. Children are very narcissistic. They don’t mean to be but they can only really understand things that they can relate to themselves. for example, ‘not stealing’ is hard to teach a kid until they have their own toys stolen and can relate their emotions to another’s experience.

Anthropomorphism is where you assign human traits to things that aren’t human. This has the results to give children an understanding of a concept through the emotional connection to a creature. These traits can be behavioral or visual.

how can we instill a concept into the minds of children wihout scaring them?
Having a direct visible connectionis very important, showing the impact from the get go. Degrees of seperation affects children too, once humans are givin one degree of seperation, we can justify most anything to an extent. We can’t show the long process of garbage in a bin, to a truck, to the factoy to another truck to a pipe to the ocean. We have to show the kid throwing it or moving it somewhere that goes directly into the ocean. It has to be their consequence.

The video linked below was provided to me by a close friend. I was discussing our project with them (If I rant to my peers for 30mins, I end up coming up with more ideas than thinking on my own) and we shifted to the subject of what influenced us as children. Alex (friend) suddenly had an epiphany of a scene from Sesame street that impacted him greatly as a child. This video is around water conservation and portrays a boy leaving a tap on as he brushes his teeth. This directly drain water from a pond outside as Frank the Fish loses his home. Alex said that he understood this well when he was younger because of the direct impact on the subject. The child wasted water. The child hurt his fish friend. The child apologized and fixed the issue.