From the company Tapp Mobile we present the application How are you. It is an educational application dedicated to children between 3 and 6 years old To stimulate their empathy, learn to relate to others and know how to recognize their different moods. The application drives the child on a tour to recognize the characteristics of the main emotions and then reproduce them with the same face.
The application includes the design of Giorgia Graziadei, titled in Design and Art by the University of Bolzano. The challenge of the application is help people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Since Tapp They explain that to work on the recognition of emotions it is not easy to get an application that solves it because the games encourage working with conceptual drawings, faces of fictional characters or other illustrations. Although it may be interesting from the point of view of the recognition of emotions, in the long term they present a problem since they hinder the generalization in human facial expressions.
So the application is built to perform two possible activities: play or see photos. With the option of to play you have to build an emotion and then take a picture imitating it. The game allows you to choose one of the twelve possible emotions in order to reconstruct them by selecting the look and mouth expression. The player has the help that shows the constructed expression up to a maximum of three times. Once the emotion is reconstructed, and automatically, the photo camera appears that allows the user to take a photo by reproducing the expression that has just been reconstructed. The goal is to help the player generalize the expression by recognizing it on his own face. The photograph is taken with a 3 to 1 countdown, and allows you to repeat it as many times as you want, keeping only the one that best represents the emotion.
The option of to see photos allows you to play to recognize the different emotions if we see them all together, or to influence one in particular by selecting a particular emotion and see only the photos associated with this emotion.
The game is built on a simple environment, with a clear drawing to describe emotions and clues to remember facial expressions. On the other hand, the possibility of seeing the photos grouped by emotions, or the option of seeing all at the same time, moves the learning to recognize the emotions in the expression of oneself.
We congratulate those responsible for Tapp for helping to work the skills necessary for people with ASD and we encourage all parents who want to take advantage of the possibilities of technology to work emotions with children.
The application works on iPad 2 or higher and is priced at 1.79 euros. It was released on May 29, 2013 and weighs 21.2 MB. It is available in English, Italian and Spanish.
