Small update

Following on from my meeting with Chris yesterday regarding changing the project to be mobile phone based and in so doing, use my “expertise” in this field, I’ve performed a little experiment with my daughter to see how she interacts with a mobile phone. I developed a game called BluPong for mobile phones last year and I sat down with her to try and get her to play it. Whilst the enthusiasm was there, the fine motor skills to control the bat with the small joystick or the numbers wasn’t. Next was to try and get her to take a picture with the inbuilt camera but again this was a bit of a failure as she just didn’t understand. Considering her language skills, texting was out of the question.

So next up was to see just how many children in the senior part of her school had mobile phones. Fortunately being friends with one of the TAs helped and after a quick phone call the figure is zero. Not one has a mobile phone and her comment seemed to back up my theory in that they just don’t know how to use them. If something that is phone based is the route I should take then it needs to be really easy to use, possibly even use speech (recognition and synthesis) as well as keeping to my core principles of cheap and tailorable. This is likely to be hard but then, isn’t the project meant to be?