PRODUCT FOCUS
LINGUMI LEARNING CUBES Teaching languages to youngsters through AR play
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ondon-based start-up Lingumi, founded by graduates from Oxford and UCL, recently launched its first product: a connected toy that teaches languages to infants through play. Lingumi Learning Cubes consists of five connected child-safe cubes in a little white box that interact with an app on a tablet or smartphone. The kit is designed for children aged two to six years old, the period when infants’ brains are proven to be most adapted to language learning. The game teaches five languages, including English, French and Mandarin. Toby Mather, a modern languages graduate from Oxford, decided to start Lingumi while he was teaching English to children in Russia: “We wanted to design an app for language learning, but our academic research and conversations with families with young children led us towards something more tactile and interactive than just tapping and swiping, so we designed the cubes.” The app works using camera technology developed by co-founder Adit Trivedi, a computer science graduate from UCL. The Lingumi Learning Cubes are child-safe foam cubes that use augmented reality (AR) technology to connect to an iOS or
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Android tablet or smartphone. Unique binary codes are printed onto the faces of the cubes, and are detected by the app using the front-facing camera on the tablet or smartphone, as the child and parent play. This means that there is no technology or sensors in the box or the cubes, which can be chucked about by the kids as much as they like without risking technical damage. ‘When I saw the Lingumi cubes, my first thought was this could be really motivating for some of my ASD kids; the language used is simple and repetitive and the visuals could really engage them’ Helen Froggatt, NHS speech therapist When a child puts a cube on the box, which is their ‘playing area’, it activates a character on the smartphone or tablet screen (the same colour, with the same face as the character on the cube), and that character teaches them a word, or activates an object on the screen. For example, in one game a baby is in its high chair asking for food items, and the characters are on shelves around the baby, holding the items: if it asks for milk, and you trigger the character holding the milk, that character gives the milk to the baby who says ‘Yum, milk’
(this varies depending on the grammar model). If you trigger the apple, the baby will say something like ‘No, not the apple, I want milk’. The scientific method behind the idea has been developed with advice from world experts in child language acquisition, including Professor William O’Grady from the University of Hawaii, author of How Children Learn Language and an advisor to the company. The start up is also running an academic study with Dr Caroline Floccia, an expert in psycholinguistics at Plymouth University Baby Lab (Department of Psychology) on an academic study to measure how well children learn words in a second language, across different conditions to test the effectiveness of the method. “Most learning apps make claims that they haven’t backed up scientifically; we’re trying to be thorough with our research,” says Mather. In terms of measuring input, there are multiple ways it is done with Lingumi: one is measuring how accurately children respond to questions by selecting correct cube colours. Others measure engagement: which types of games children prefer, and how long they spend playing them. The model then delivers the same language, but
KEY FEATURES Colourful cubes that interact with Lingumi apps, made from squishy, child-safe foam Self-strengthening learning content delivered to learners across interlinking products A structured methodology, blending tactile play and digital apps Products for under 6s, informed by user testing and ongoing academic studies Compatible with Apple iOS 8.4 and above, and Android 2.3 or above through preferred types of games. An example of how it would work is that the system would figure out that a child was having difficulty with understanding the word ‘apple’, and so it would loop back and deliver that child a very simple game, in which the ‘apple’ was shown on screen with the audio repeated several times. Then, at a later stage, it would check again to see if they understood ‘apple’ in a more complex game, by seeing if they recognised which cube to use to trigger it. Lingumi, retailing at £34.99, is an exciting development in linguistics. www.lingumi.com April 2016
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