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Education to Improve Public Health: An Application that Inspires the Design of Creative and Meaningful Tangible Play for Children

Jessie Dong

Play is essential in child development. Children have the instinct to play, and they also learn from play. Learning through play can be both spontaneous and intentionally designed. Spontaneous learning through play is associated with motor skills, social-emotional learning, and cognitive development, while intentionally-designed play can be related to academic knowledge and skills. The recent trends emphasize meaningful tangible play, emphasizing the physical play among children to learn different disciplines.

Both educators and designers are involved in designing meaningful tangible play for children. Several factors contribute to successful design, including creativity, techniques, knowledge base, inspiration resource, and empathy with children. While educators have a knowledge base in child development and everyday interactions with children, designers have a knowledge base in design methods and techniques and design resources and tools. Both groups lack some knowledge and skills to design successful and useful products. Thus, this paper proposes an application to help both groups build knowledge and skills by inspiring them to discover inspiration sources in their daily lives and to enhance positive interaction and information exchange between the two groups.