Elements Research
Since the content of the app is going to be about the elements of the periodic table and where they are in everyday things, I had to do a lot of research to understand the periodic table and learn about the elements so that I know what content to include.
I fist reaching out to a friend of mine who is currently studying chemistry in Maynooth. We had a call on discord my concept to her which she thought would be class, and she helped direct me towards different resources and what kind of info wouldn’t really be necessary or relevant to include in an app for kids.
To get we started, she directed me to a couple periodic table resources online which I found were really handy and came back to regularly throughout the journey of this project.
Online
My rationale for find resources to learn about the elements and thus put together the informational content of my screens, was to try and stick with ones that are meant for kids. This is a sure fire and super simple and easy way of making sure that the content I’d include would’t be too complicated and completely irrelevant to a 10. year old.
Here are the resources online i found that were the most help to me…
Chem4Kids really helped me pick my elements for the prototype as it showed where elements are commonly found in every day life. Duckster was really great as it had so much information on the characteristics, locations, uses and interesting facts for each of the element.
Books
As well as going online I looked at some children’s books on the topic. I looked for ones on the Donegal Library’s borrow box but didn’t really find anything and when looking online I found ones that seemed really cool and interesting but were a bit to pricey to be buying for this project and then probably never needing it again and with what tight money I have I want to spend it on books I’ll continue to get use out of. That said for some of them I was able to take a sneaky wee peak and some of their content in the preview pictures on amazon.
I then went and just bought some cheaper ebooks on kindle. This was my favourite…
This book was brilliantly funny and entertaining to read and I’m saying this as an adult. It’s also jam packed with information.
The illustrations and little joke comic strips are so fun and the book got me thinking a lot about the tone of voice I should use for presenting the facts not just Evie’s narration.
Content Planning
Item and Element Pairings
From my researching I was able plan out which 5 items in the room I would illustrate and what element they would lead to learning about…
Dialogue
I then wrote some dialogue for Evie’s Speech bubbles when you unbox each item…
Getting My facts together
The I went and wrote out the facts I was going to include for each element…
I consulted my friend again and also a science teacher who my aunt knows to make sure that the info checks out and that it works for kids. One thing that I noted was that some things don’t need to be 100% accurate if it’s for kids like you don’t need to include all the decimals for atomic weight, rounding the number works fine.
User Flow
Here is a user flow I did of how a user would go about learning about an element. I did this while starting to work on my prototype in Adobe XD.
