Project · 2012/132012/13Type: Physical product

Music Blox

A music tool trains children's creativity through hearing, touch, sight and body movement

Supporting the creativity of children

Corporate partner Carvajal Visit website ↗Cohort 2012/13Theme Education & society

Music Blox – Carvajal (2012/13)
Team
7 master students
Universities
The project · from brief to prototype

What happened, step by step.

01

Challenge

Carvajal, a Colombian maker of educational and entertainment tools for children, asked for new ways to support the creativity of children aged 0 to 12, with a focus on Latin America.

02

What they built

Music Blox is an intuitive tool for children to play and compose music. It stimulates hearing, touch and vision, plus a sense of time and kinaesthesia: awareness of body position and movement, key to muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.

Full project text

The team’s original texts from the project page.

Music Blox, an attractive and intuitive tool for kids to play and compose music.

Challenge

How to help develop creativity through experience in kids and young teenagers between the ages 0-12?

Creativity is an abstract term, but in a nutshell, it means the ability to create new things – ideas, solutions, uses, stories, music, pictures…or to add value to existing things. All people are creative – some more, some less, but we all need creativity during the journeys of our lives. We need it for example to solve different problems we are facing or just to create something entertaining for ourselves or others. Carvajal, a Colombian company manufacturing educational and entertaining tools for kids, has asked the Colombian-Finnish student team to develop new solutions to support the creativity of children between ages 0 and 12, with a focus on the Latino-American market.

Solution

Music Blox is a concept that aims to develop the creativity of children by creating an experience that stimulates most of the traditional human senses, like hearing, touch, and vision. In addition, the concept is connected to the senses that are less often considered as senses: a sense of time and kinesthetic sense. Kinesthesia is the awareness of the position and movement of the parts of the body, and it is a key component in muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.

Impact

Music Blox can be considered as the easiest or fun way to make music; a way of learning to write, to read, or to calculate; a way to support storytelling; an inspiring way to build objects; a way for visually or audibly impaired people to create music – or possibly in the future – a professional music-making tool.

Team · 7 students, 2 universities

Who built it.

Juan Méndez
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Juan Méndez

Maria Paula Jaramillo
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Maria Paula Jaramillo

Juan D. Ariza
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Juan D. Ariza

Jonathan Sandoval
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Jonathan Sandoval

Justus Reinikainen
Aalto University · Design Factory

Justus Reinikainen

Maud Bocquillod-Silverang
Aalto University · Design Factory

Maud Bocquillod-Silverang

Joakim Eriksson
Aalto University · Design Factory

Joakim Eriksson