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Overview
Problem
of school-aged children struggle to develop the handwriting skills needed to keep up in class.
Traditional workbooks lack step-by-step stroke guidance, while digital apps lack the physical resistance required to build muscle memory. Without constant supervision, children treat letters as graphics, form them incorrectly, and reinforce poor habits over time.
Design Response
Doodle Dash overlays AR guidance onto traditional paper workbooks. Through a headset:
Animated arrows guide each stroke in correct order and direction
Audio narration from a cartoon character reinforces the lesson
Real-time corrective feedback lets children self-correct without adult supervision
Story-driven missions with interactive 3D rewards reinforce letter–word–object connections
The Concept Video
Overview
Conceptual Impact
Physical + digital XR interaction
The AR experiences extend tangible activities rather than replicate them on screen.
Translating Theory to AR
Developed a principle-to-feature framework mapping four educational principles into specific, gamified mixed-reality interactions.
End-to-end concept execution
End-to-end concept execution: UX research, interaction design, motion design, and 3D spatial prototyping in Spline.
Research
Competitive Analysis
To understand the current landscape, I examined the tools children use today — traditional workbooks and digital handwriting apps — to surface where each succeeds, where each fails, and how those failures show up in real behaviour.
(Note: No existing AR products address handwriting practice specifically, so the competitive set focuses on the analog and digital tools currently in use.)
Handwriting workbook
Visual-word association:
The illustration demonstrates the alphabet in context
Lack of guidance on stroke sequence and formation
No stroke validation & No error correction
Handwriting workbook
Clear starting points:
Indicate the starting point for forming the alphabet
Story integration
Incomplete guidance for letters requiring multiple strokes
Overly complex scenes:
Illustrations feature distracting elements beyond the alphabet that may confuse learners.
Handwriting practice app
Animated instructions on stroke direction, sequence, and letter formation
Immediate feedback when incorrect letter formation is traced
Weak muscle memory formation:
Digital handwriting on touchscreens limits the development of muscle memory for letter formation
Animated instructions only play once, making it difficult to remember
Research
Contextual Observation
I observed one preschool-age learner using both a traditional workbook and a digital handwriting app, documenting behaviors, expressions, and verbal feedback. While this is not generalizable, it surfaced friction points that competitive analysis alone couldn’t reveal.
Design & Refinement
Features Mapping
The following framework shows how each research insight informed a design principle, which in turn shaped a specific AR feature, ensuring every interaction addresses an observed pain point.
Research
Storyboard
To validate the end-to-end flow, I storyboarded a single practice session from a first-person view — testing whether the AR features connect into a coherent learning loop.
