Deirbhile Kennedy

I am a 22 year old Illustrator and UX Designer born and bred in Belfast. During my time studying Interaction Design at Belfast School of Art I have gained many new skills to help me become a better UX designer, as well as enhancing exisitng skills such as Illustration which has always been a love and passion of mine.

My major project is a children’s interactive nature treasure hunt game called ‘Nature Hunt’. It gives children the opportunity to hunt and find nature related items while out on walks with family or on school trips while collecting fact cards and playing quizzes to help test their new knowledge.

Nature Hunt

Nature Hunt is an interactive and educational gaming application for children aged 6-8. Augmented Reality (AR) is the main aspect of the game. Allowing children to interact using their tablet whilst out for walks in the park or on schools trips

The Aim of the game is to find items related to nature and gather fact cards to learn along the way, the end goal is to find and collect as many fact cards as possible to enter quizzes and win Nature Badges which will be sent out so your children can wear a home and feel like a true Nature Hunter

The Process

The creation of Nature hunt has been a long and educational process, with myself gaining many new skills by the end. The start of Nature Hunt began with a lot of research on educational games already on the market, as I wanted my own to be unique and different from others already available on the app store.

I went on to design User Personas to get an idea of what children aged 6-8 are looking for in an educational game as this allowed me to come up with ideas for certain features of the game. With my strenght being in Illustation I really wanted this to show throughout the game. I wanted to create something fun and colourful to keep children interested. Once all my ideas had been gathered I brought everything onto figma to begin creating wireframes giving me the opportunity to play around with how I wanted the game to look by experimenting with different layouts and colour before moving onto the final prototype.

The Outcome

I used Figma to create a protoype to display how this interactive game would work, bringing you through each screen to show how much of an easy game it is to navigate around especially for younger children. You can check this out here by downloading the figma file

Throughout this project I have gained many new skills such as prototyping and animation which is something I haven’t really worked with much before then and also improved existing skills in illustration which overall have benefitted my major project.

Nature Hunts aim was to get children to want to learn more about the environment around them. It is designed to allow easier and more interactive ways of learning increasing the independence of children learning in there own time and space.

Find out more at naturehuntapp.co.uk and check out my tumblr for a more detailed process of my work.

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