Toy for learning Basic letters of Devanagari Script for Children using OCR technology

The aim of this project is to design a toy which helps children in learning the basic letters (मुळाक्षरे) of Marathi and Hindi as their mother tongue (Devanagari script). The project uses OCR, Camera based Image Processing Technology, which makes it a unique toy for teaching language script.

It was found that Ist & IInd standard children find it difficult to recognize devanagari letters, especially complex letters like क्ष ज्ञ झ ह ख, moreover they lack in sufficient amount of practice. Using the hypothesis that if users play with the primitives, they can learn devanagari letters; several explorations, experiments and research were done considering the technology constraints. Various design ideas were generated and prototyped in order to get findings for refinement in the design.

As a final prototype, ‘अक्षरमाळ’ a platform based 2D digital video game along with a child friendly modular font primitive set was created. The user uses primitives to navigate through different stages of the game which represents different letters. This prototype was then used to validate the proposed hypothesis.