Team Macho - Toys for Learning

IR Pen Revealed!

This is an accurate diagram of what the insides of our homemade IR pen look like. Except for one small difference:

We didn't have to split the marker open to make ours! That's right, our pen is still solid as you can see from this shot with the wiimote. The pen includes:

1 Removable AA Battery located conveniently in the pen's cap
1 Extra Bright IR LED
1 Debounced Push Button
Snazzy Pink Casing
Lots of wiring
Blood, sweat and tears of the Macho crew

The result: An IR pen that hasn't run out of batteries, broken down, or even shone faintly throughout our entire production, testing, and (knock on wood) presentation!

Our next consideration is to make a pen that uses a pressure-sensitive button located inside to sense when it's being pressed against our magic whiteboard!

Stay Macho,
-Rob

(download)

User Testing Videos: East Palo Alto Library After School Program

3rd-5th graders from EPA Library's after school program were allowed to test out DoodleTunes (provided they'd finished their homework first). The result was some of our most insightful testing yet.

(download)

The kids love the bird cursor (especially the larger, flying bird), and our underwater theme. They were quick to understand the relation where and what color they drew, and the sound that DoodleTunes made. Although the pen gave some kids trouble at the beginning, they collaboratively helped each other, and everyone was proficient with the IR pen in no time.

Because of our "Play as you Draw" feature, students heard what note they were drawing right away, which may be why they drew so many squiggles. After a few turns though, the kids started to draw scenes to "see how they sounded." This breakthrough quickly spread to the entire group and each kid wanted to draw his or her favorite scene.

Possibly our most rewarding discovery was when we tried "Simon Says" with 10 or so kids. We drew a simple shape on another computer and played it for the group, then asked them to decide what instrument was playing and try to draw what the sound looked like on DoodleTunes. Students worked together to figure out the instrument that was played, and then nominated a drawer to attempt to recreate the sound. The results were somewhat close to the actual sound, although the kids may have been a bit too young to fully understand the pitch-vs-time graph. This feature really excited the kids and let us know that we needed a group-play feature for the next version.