Jun 2007 – Nov 2007
Pheonix Phonics

RMIT University Industrial Design Bachelor Project

Working closely with SpeldVic, the Victorian Dyslexia Association, the design looks specifically at meeting the needs of dyslexic learners, whose major difficulties revolve around the processing of phonetic information (the sounds and symbols used in language) and who have been shown to benefit greatly from multi-sensory teaching methods. Phoenix Phonics is an interactive learning device designed to assist in increasing phonetic awareness and manipulation by engaging all four of the users’ modalities for learning; visual, auditory, tactile and kinaesthetic. Applying Tangible-User-Interaction design principles that foster physical thinking and doing over interpretation of graphical language, the system uses webcam recognition software to sense reference markers on the underside of blocks. Each block represents a phoneme (the individual sounds that make up the English language) while the different sides of the blocks are engraved with the different graphemes (letter representations of phonemes) for that phoneme. When a block is placed in the writing area of the table an audio recording of its phoneme is played, while a projector underneath gives visual prompts and feedback. When multiple blocks are placed in the writing area their combined phonemes are played in order from left to right. The final working prototype was tested by a specialist teacher on two dyslexic children, the results of which were very positive with the children being able to literally "build up" and "break down” words.
As presented at Piksel 07in Belgium
2nd place in the Victorian Student Design Awards 2007