How can we add a visual feedback to kids interactions. Not having hover effects (due to being on touch devices) brings some fun challenges about how to interact with the elements on the screen.
What can we build that would give a sense of fun & delight while selecting and clicking things around.
Can we allow kids to interact in fun ways even on idle states? (i.e. while waiting for instructions to finish).
What if kids touch events are analogous to kids playing with a notebook and a pen?.
What if that pen can do different things depending on the context and the required action?
We have been short on creative names here but what if we use a magic trail as the primary interaction**.** The same way a kid draws with fun pens and colors, but using that as our mouse/pointer.
Early explorations:
Credit where credit is due. Folks at tldraw not only have been inspiring me lately with their demos but also Steve (tldraw founder) wrote the fantastic perfect-freehand library. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to use it in production for a while.
I use tldraw daily and I came across their ‘scribble’ effect used for selecting shapes or for the laser tool. I thought that something similar could be a fun way of having a disappearing drawing, that also can be used to circle things, select things, or play with the background.
(I was also tempted to use tldraw sdk for our activities, but more on that another time).
<aside> 💛 If you are thinking on building any kind of canvas app, please give tldraw.dev a try, the work they are doing is amazing.
</aside>