Armadillo
Armadillo is a playmat prototype designed to stimulate various exploration strategies in children helping them to build their spatial reasoning skills. The playmat provides an open environment in which the child gets to be the author of his or her play narrative. Its form is a 38-celled collapsoid, but at the same time could be a crocodile, a castle, a chair, or a treasure chest for your favorite toys.Designed to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play, and has proven to stimulate the following exploration strategies:
+Transporting
+Color Recognition and Pattern Finding
+ Inventing
+Storing and Locating
+Tossing
+Interacting and Social Play
+Resting and Seating
Armadillo is a flexible tool that catalyzes invention, ideation, and exploration, contrary to what a rigid play environment would do. It is a prototype with modifiable rules that promotes original ideas, creation of new games, creation of stories, problem solving, and construction of something distinctive out of common shapes and forms. Armadillo gives children the opportunity to learn through active play and the tools to become creative innovators in the future.
2015 Impact Wrkshp Fellows:
Mariana Hinojosa
Daniela Hinojosa
Project Lead:
Irina Schneid, AIA