Awesome

Emotions-WWDC20

This is my submission to the WWDC20 Student Swift Challenge.

What is Emotions?

“Emotions” is a tool developed for teachers and parents to help kids understand, identify and express their emotions. It started as a project focused on kids with disabilities but later evolved to also be used by kids with speech, language and communication needs. Emotions are very important for communicating with others. The ability to correctly identify people’s emotions and understand them is called Empathy. The lack of this ability make it be very difficult to interact and communicate.

This tool was developed to help kids in their learning path by encouraging them to play with emotions, while trying to identify, understand and convey them.

How does it work?

This project includes two main screens. The first, titled “Spot the Emotion” is designed to let kids play and experiment with emotions in a tactile and fun way. Animations and sound effects are used to maintain kids attention while they explore and learn about their emotions.

The main object kids interact with during this project are buttons shaped as Emojis representing five of the seven basic emotions we express with our faces: Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Surprise. Emojis were chosen because they are used in our every day online communications which makes them easy to identify. After using this tool kids may fully understand the link between emojis and emotions and may use them to express their own feelings in future communication.

Every time they select one of the emojis it displays an animation growing in size, remarking its importance, playing a sound effect in addition to showing and speaking its name.

The second tool, called "How do you feel when you..." is designed to give teachers and parents a way to understand kid’s feelings in different situations.

Handing the control to the kids eliminates the pressure they feel when forced to express their emotions while observed. Using this tool kids can be far from any distractions and pressure. They can use it in their own place and time, being able to stop to really think about the different situations being presented to them.

Furthermore, using the “History” tab, parents and teachers can later review the results and use them to understand how kids feel and how those feelings evolve overtime.

What technologies were used?

This project is developed in its entirety using SwiftUI, which was chosen because of its flexibility and the ease of adding animations and effects. Making it the perfect tool to develop this project, showcasing a great potential structure. This allows to make a full app out of this project in the future without a lot of extra work.

The other technology featured is AVFoundation, used to give the experience a new layer of senses by adding an AVSpeechSynthesizer to speak the selected emotion as well as the situation selected in the second screen. This lets kids better connect each emotion name to their respective emoji and therefore the facial expression commonly used to represent it. Also making the project accesible to kids that haven’t developed reading skills yet.

How to try it?

Simple, just follow this steps:

1. Download the project file
2. Run it in Swift Playgrounds App on macOS

(While the proyect can technically be run on Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS, it is not currently optimized for that screen size and you will most likely lose functionality)

Hope you liked the project!