Research/Inspiration Project 2 - Gadget

First of all I'm looking at websites to see if there's anything out there that's already encouraging kids to save energy. There's not. I found a few websites that look 'pretty', but as soon as you click on something it takes you to a page with screeds of text that made me, let alone kids, want to back out of the browser, or just an error page, where this need to make kids energywise has really fallen through.

http://energyquest.ca.gov/index.html is one such website. It has this really cool homepage, but it doesn't go anywhere - just to pages with heaps of text - kids would be lost on the site. It's not intuitive enough to make kids want to explore and be inspired to conserve energy. It needs to be portrayed as a game, not a chore - kids hate chores. :) The games on this page aren't even energy conservation related - I played them...

Another website is http://www1.eere.energy.gov/kids/roofus/ - I think I found it as a link off the first one. It again just goes to a little lecture about energy, not particularly conducive to making kids want to be energy smart.

So basically there's very little on the internet that's interactive enough to inspire little Einsteins to want to go change the world, leaving a gap for a kids' website that I could design to encourage this. Children's social networking sites like Club Penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/) and Moshi Monsters (http://www.moshimonsters.com/) are both very popular with the 7-12 age group and have potential to give rise to a social networking site that is based around a competitive energy saving environment.

Or, perhaps a physical device might work better as it's more tangible. One toy that came to mind to do with this project was the Tamagotchi device:

Kids LOVE these and the idea behind them is nurturing a virtual pet - what would happen if we nurtured the pet but instead of feeding the pet food, we feed it with good energy use? This idea was also inspired by the virtual plant image that I posted a few weeks ago - that the plant grows when the energy is used wisely. It might not be an accurate method of measuring the energy but it's a very child friendly one.

Also, something else that came to mind when I was thinking about Tamagotchis was an old craze of 'Scannerz':

hese were gadgets which you could scan everyday barcodes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code) with and fight rival tribes monsters if you happened upon a barcode containing that particular monster. They also had a function to fight against each other, similar to Tamagotchis - in this way you had a live interaction going on which encouraged kids to get competitive and stay interested in the product. Retaining attention is very important in a product for kids, as they typically have such short attention spans. I was thinking about potentially applying this to an energy scenario where you can scan something like an energy star rating:

and play against friends - better energy conservation is the object of the games.