Interactive soft puppets to connect kids and parents
October 15th, 2013
— Footprints is a network of interactive soft puppets for creating and sharing illustrated stories between parents and children.
The project, prototyped with Arduino by italian designer Simone Capano, involves parents into their children’s everyday lives, by sharing an intimate moments like telling a story but it could also connect the world of school with the world families when data are collected into a cloud.
How does it work?
- The communication process is started by the parent. With the smartphone the parent can record a little vocal story, add some images proposed by Footprints about the story he has just told, like the story’s characters or other objects related to it. After he can send it all to the child’s puppet.
- At school, the child can listen to the story by placing the puppet on the tablet and play with the images he has received to build a drawing about the story.
- Once the drawing is complete, Footprints send it back to the parent who can track the path of the stories shared with his child through the smartphone app which, in time, collects and documents all the drawings.
Take a look at the video to see it in action: