Community Contribution #6
One learning experience I wanted to share is during my summer, I took a course which is about design thinking, and for my final project, I had to design a product that would overcome barriers in daily life, which I designed an educational light switch for children, which helps to cater children on their learning about how to operate a light switch in a safe and fun way, and the outcome when turning lights on or off. I think with what I did for my project, it helps to promote self-determination because with parents wanting to teach children on how light switches work, especially in an early age, this relates to the Self-Determination Theory by Triumph Kerins because with my product having an educational feature, this helps to promote autonomy because as the light is turned on, the sunshine symbol that appears, and when the light is turned off, the moon symbol appears, which shows young children on how turning lights on and off relates to day or night visuals. Also, the competence of the product helps as a motivation to children because as children are curious on how turning lights on makes the home corridor bright, it helps not just the child to see clearer because of the bright light, but it gives a responsibility to the child that they helped their parents to do a favor, by turning on the light. So this promotes the children’s motivation during one of their developmental stage (Kerins, 2021).
If I was to make an opinion, I think designing an educational product for young children is very important because even though they do not know how to properly use technology yet, I think this is a good way for an early stage of personalized learning which they get to explore, learn and know on what they are doing, or what are they aware of from themselves. With technology developing over time, I think this would make children’s learning more accessible because it would help to adapt with daily life for all age groups, and with products like Google Home, this helps to increase accessibility because without having to physically do certain things, voice commands can already give the task to the computer, and it’ll do it all for you, so I think one day, Google Home would be more common, and we could teach children on how to use this new technological feature in future.
References:
Kerins, Triumph. 2021. “Self-Determination Theory.” The Decision Lab. August 30, 2021. https://thedecisionlab.com/es-ES/reference-guide/psychology/self-determination-theory.