A group of straight male programmers who don't want to over-train their children have already started working on a pen!

After the three-child policy was announced, many parents declined the offer: in this era of involutionary education, kindergarten and primary school interviews require a large vocabulary and the ability to recite ancient poems, and they are exhausted just by supervising their children to complete basic learning tasks every day.

Every time I see similar anxiety about raising children, I think of the famous Moravec paradox in the field of AI: "It is relatively easy to make a machine play chess like an adult, but it is quite difficult or even impossible to make a machine have the perception and action capabilities of a one-year-old child."

In this era of accelerated intelligence, how to help children unleash their potential and build an appropriate ability system in childhood is what the whole society and parents should think about.

On May 25, the intelligent learning company NetEase Youdao released a learning intelligent hardware product designed for children aged 3-12 years old - the NetEase Youdao Children's Dictionary Pen. The reason why we pay attention to this news is that there is also a "paradox" worth pondering.

For example, how do a group of straight male programmers design hardware products that understand children? In the past, smart software and hardware focused more on the K12 group. Do 3-year-old children also have a rigid need to learn? Educational hardware also needs to stimulate interest in learning. What preconditions need to be met? Behind curiosity, perhaps hidden is the key to unlocking the future of happy education.

Therefore, we talked to the technical team of NetEase Youdao and tried to use three moments to explain how the door to the happy era of children's education was opened step by step.

The first moment: when a pen is picked up

A pen that helps children solve their English learning problems must first be able to be picked up by children - this may sound like a correct nonsense, but it is the basic premise of hardware design. Mobile phones used by adults are becoming thinner and lighter, while mainstream dictionary products on the market are a bit too heavy for three-year-old children whose pen-holding strength is far less than that of teenagers.

In the early childhood enlightenment stage, there is a huge demand for dictionary hardware for learning English and reading picture books. As a result, many children on social platforms struggled to hold the first generation of products to listen to and read words. Seeing the children stumbling and still trying very hard to scan the word cards, the programmers of NetEase Youdao were shocked.

"We were thinking at the time, should we make this product (dictionary pen) more friendly to these young children? If a child works so hard, why can't the technical team help him?"

The research and development team of NetEase Youdao Children's Dictionary Pen decided to make a dictionary pen that even a three-year-old child can easily hold.

The first and foremost difficulty is to reduce the size and weight of the hardware.

"At the beginning of the project, we set a clear standard. If the weight does not meet the requirements, we will not accept it to be put on the market." Thus, this group of programmers began a "self-abuse" journey of constantly arguing over the weight of "0.1 grams".

The new generation of children's dictionary pen that was finally polished weighs less than 60 grams. They are proud to say: "As a reading pen commonly used by children, ours should be the lightest dictionary pen currently available on the market, only about 57 grams, basically a three-year-old child can hold it."

In addition to weight, children also feel hardware differently from adults. A group of straight men got together and tried to simulate children's pen-holding habits to fine-tune the appearance of the product.

"We found that children do not hold the pen in a pinch like adults do, but rather grasp it, so we made this generation of dictionary pens more rounded, with different curvature designs to fit children's hands."

It even goes as far as updating the materials, using warmer, skin-friendly materials on the children's version instead of the cold and cool materials like adult technology hardware.

The "soft power" of human-computer interaction cannot be ignored, and a series of special designs are needed based on children's learning habits and cognitive development levels.

"Compared to adults, children are more sensitive to touch screen interactions on small screens, and their point-to-read actions are relatively less precise. At the same time, the content that children learn is not that complex, and only two or three definitions are needed to meet their current learning needs. So when choosing the screen, we also specifically adopted a 1.9-inch size and presented the content in a more interesting and concise way." said a technician from NetEase Youdao.

I think that this time when the children pick up the pen again, they will not only feel the warmth from the world of science and technology, but also the precious understanding and respect from a group of adults for the children.

The second moment: When a pair of eyes are attracted

No matter how light a pen is, a sentence like “My child doesn’t like to memorize words at all” can directly declare “the end of the play”.

Children's attention is easily attracted by the massive content and devices around them, and it is difficult for them to maintain their concentration. The ultimate solution is to make them feel the fun in learning, which requires humanized "child-friendly" design.

What kind of interaction is "child-friendly"? The premise is to respect the learning rules of children.

Andrew Metzoff, deputy director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, believes that one of the reasons why children can learn so quickly is that they love to play. "When children play, it seems to be aimless, but it is a kind of learning."

Combining learning with games is the design concept that NetEase Youdao has injected into the children's dictionary pen.

In English learning, through game-based level-breaking exercises, children can memorize words while playing, thus avoiding "dumb English";

The ancient poetry learning function uses image positioning method with vivid audio explanations, allowing children to say goodbye to rote memorization and learn pinyin through visual thinking;

Contents such as the Little Elephant Chinese Character Oracle Game Cards, "My First English Vocabulary Book", and an interactive reading globe allow children to acquire knowledge subtly through interactive reading games.

Although it seems simple to increase interactivity, there are actually many challenges in the technical path. Take the point-reading globe function as an example. To transform a flat earth image into a three-dimensional sphere, there are many unknown changes in the mapping process. These require a lot of data and actual measurements to make adjustments to reduce deformation. In order to allow the three-dimensional globe to carry more information and satisfy children's curiosity to fully explore the world, this group of programmers set a requirement for themselves - "I hope to make a coordinate-based product so that each position on the globe has a different point code", which brought a lot of development work and made the point-reading globe function of NetEase Youdao Children's Dictionary Pen stand out.

Another characteristic of children's learning is that they understand the behavior of others through their own experience. The lack of external help such as interaction and feedback will greatly reduce the children's learning effectiveness.

In this regard, the technical staff of NetEase Youdao understands it this way: "For children, (learning) this part requires great interest. At this time, we hope that the dictionary pen can become more proactive, more personified, and more soulful."

So we see that a cute virtual monkey named Matti is added to the children's dictionary pen. It can act like a "partner" in learning, leading children to interactively answer questions, play games, practice oral reading, etc., and give positive encouragement from time to time to stimulate their interest and concentration in learning.

With the help of the AI ​​voice assistant, we can explain unfamiliar words, provide feedback on interactive exercises, correct mental arithmetic results, etc., so that children can persist in effective learning through real-time interaction.

Especially when many parents help their children with calculations and correct oral arithmetic homework, they will inevitably feel exhausted and angry. At this time, AI voice assistants become an excellent buffer zone for parent-child relationships.

By migrating algorithm models such as formula recognition and image detection to the dictionary pen, AI is used to analyze questions and knowledge points and provide answers. When faced with elementary school math questions with a variety of flexible question types, the teacher can effectively identify the patterns and logic of the questions and correct the math homework without the help of parents.

After hearing this, I feel that this is not just a pen to help with learning, but also a good way to reduce the burden on parents.

In ancient times, Confucius and his disciples "had five or six men with hats and six or seven boys, who went to the Wu Yu Temple to dance and sing on their way home." Today, Metzoff believes that "children learn by playing and observing others, and they are the best learners on earth."

From this perspective, the "child-friendly" design practiced by NetEase Youdao Dictionary Pen also shares the same philosophy as educators, which is that learning does not necessarily have to be accompanied by pain, but can also be accompanied by happiness.

The third moment: When an ability is changed

Of course, for most parents, educational products are ultimately responsible for their effectiveness. In this regard, the NetEase Youdao Children's Dictionary Pen is not "out of touch with the world".