An Interactive Guide to Learning a New Language is a prototype for a set of educational tools that bridge the gap between physical and digital mediums to create an immersive experience for people learning new languages.
The project
This project is comprised of a website and a physical book that work in tandem to teach a speculative language that we developed. The book is embedded with soft circuitry that outputs data to the web to become a tangible interface to the web.
intent
Our goal for this project was twofold: to create a speculative language, and to develop a cost-effective tool that would teach this new language that incorporated both web and tactile interfaces to augment a multi-faceted educational experience and utilizes affordable hardware that can used together or separately. Learning languages is a multi-sensory experience; we see this project as a platform for learning any new language (fictional or real) where the user has the capability to utilize a wider range of senses (touch, sound, and sight) to deeply immerse themselves in a new language.
Materials
RFduinos, paper circuit board, conductive fabric and silver ink, magnets, capacitive touch sensors; website built with Javascript and HTML, CSS
Sketches for the first iteration of the character set inspired by ideographic writing systems and pictographic codes like Blissymbolics and Hoboglyphs.
The language
The pictographic language system that makes up the book’s content is a concept for a new universal auxiliary language that acts as an alternative to Esperanto (which only draws from Latin and Germanic languages) and incorporates Aramaic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and other global influences in its visual development.
Insights from First Prototype
User tests with our first prototype showed that our preliminary glyphs were too complex, so we simplified the characters into more basic forms in order to facilitate the learning process by breaking down the tasks into more manageable blocks - similar to language learning tools like Duolingo, which employs a gamified skill tree system to help users progress through the lessons.
the circuit
We also realized our circuit was too bulky, so we decided to replace our original Arduino Yun with an RFduino, which is smaller, sleeker, and more powerful.
second prototype
Incorporating these insights led to our second prototype: The website augments the book component; sensors in the pages allow the user to control onscreen media by flipping the pages and pressing embedded buttons in the book.
The phrasebook is comprised of terms that are comprised of the above alphabet in various permutations:
Recognition
Presenting at the NYC Media Lab Future Interfaces event at Razorfish with partner Nour Chamoun where we received a ton of great feedback on the challenges of learning new tongues and what people were looking for in the search for the best language learning tools.