An interactive smart music toy design for children

Abstract

With the improvement of social material conditions, children’s education has drawn increasing attention. Children’s toys enter the field of vision as an important medium for children’s education, while the advent of a variety of scientific and technological achievements gave birth to the intelligent trend of children’s toys. At the same time, traditional children’s music education has many inconveniences, application of scientific and technological achievements is also needed in this education process. It provides a perfect opportunity for children’s musical education to be the perfect application scenarios for children’s smart toys. With related market research and targeted user research, a new design idea of interactive smart music toy for children is put forward. The musical instrument type music toy is selected for product design, and designed from three parts: design research, product scheme design and program test. Using the hand wearable product solution, an interactive way was designed that conforms to the natural behavior and psychological cognition of the children, to let children feel the charm of music and enhance children’s visual perception and coordination of hand movements ability. This article uses the methods of desktop research, user interviews and tangible user interfaces design principles to sort out the design characteristics of children’s music toys in the market, and draw our design opportunities after analyzing its advantages and disadvantages. Then the target user’s needs and product design were taken. Under the theoretical guidance of the tangible user interface, the product’s design ideas are improved and the system design of the product is carried out. Finally, the feasibility of the design scheme is verified through user test. The analysis and experimental results show that the design of the interactive children’s smart music toy scheme is reasonable and feasible, which can stimulate children’s interest in use and enhance the user experience to a certain degree when they carry out music education.