Tunin’ was designed for the 2018 Children’s Media Conference Playground at the millenium gallery in Sheffield in order to gather the responses of visitors to the exhibition.
It was important to us that children visiting the exhibition felt that their opinions mattered and that they were empowered to share what they thought of the things they experienced by being invited to answer questions in a fun and accessible way.
For this reason we wanted to move away from traditional paper surveys, and designed tunin’ to engage children through sight, touch and sound. Interaction with the machine is fun; questions are answered by picking up and placing a circular puzzle piece and placing it directly into the answer circle. Tunin’ is also responsive, enabling participants to listen to their opinions after completing the survey.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
In keeping with CMC 2018’s musical theme, each question has been assigned a musical instrument. Each instrumental piece is placed into either a yes, maybe, or no circle below each question. When each question has been answered the participant presses a button at the end in order to hear each instrument play at differing pitches depending on the response.
Each response circle has a magnet sensor below it which is linked to an arduino microcontroller and detects whether a participant has answered yes, maybe, or no, as the instrument pieces have a magnet attached to them.
When the button is pressed, the arduino is prompted to read through the sensors and find out which ones are active, playing the correct sounds, but also recording the responses (1 for yes, 2 for maybe, and 3 for no) and writing them to an SD card with
a timestamp.
The timestamp allows us to see if there are any accidental double button presses – 2 data recording within 5 seconds of each other which would mean the second recording is a mistake.
Tunin’ can also be customised; questions can be replaced. The images on the puzzle pieces and the sounds can be changed to fit a different theme. We are excited to refine and develop Tunin’ further so that it can be used in different settings.
