SoKids – Week 1 Devlog

  • Project Overview

    Our team is building SoKids, an interactive, game-based assessment tool designed to help researchers study how young children (ages 3–5) express early social perception in play. Rather than creating a game to teach or correct beliefs, SoKids aims to make children’s behavior observable and meaningful as data. The core idea is to build a play experience that feels natural and engaging for children but also generates research-grade data for psychologists studying social categorization.

    This week was all about setting foundations, defining exactly what problem we are trying to solve, who we are designing for, and why play can be a research instrument rather than just entertainment.

    Defining the Problem

    Traditional research methods for studying children’s social beliefs rely on one-on-one interviews, verbal questioning, or controlled lab tasks. These approaches are:

    • Difficult to scale: Researchers must be present for every session.
    • Resource-intensive: One-on-one work with kids takes time, money, and trained staff.
    • Artificial: Lab settings and direct questioning may influence children’s behavior in ways that don’t reflect their natural behavior.

    Our clients — Dr. Catarina Vales and Molly Niehaus from the CMU Psychology Department — described this well in our kickoff meeting:

    “The main barrier for us is that these tasks are incredibly boring… this really is the bottleneck for us to be able to collect data in ways that scale up, because currently, for us to collect this data, we need to be working one-on-one with children.”

    Inspired by this, we framed SoKids as a research instrument disguised as play, in which children’s choices and actions within a game world can yield meaningful data without the need for direct questioning.

    Client Kickoff & Alignment

    In our Week 1 client kickoff, we confirmed key constraints and goals:

    • The primary participants will be preschool-aged children (3–5).
    • Caregivers may be present to help set up the game, but should not participate in gameplay.
    • The game should not require researchers to be present during play — for scalability.
    • The data must be interpretable and meaningful to psychology researchers.

    Based on these conversations, we refined our project focus to concentrate on:

    • Gameplay interactions that naturally produce usable data.
    • Ethical design that avoids inadvertently introducing concepts children don’t already have.
    • Research the usefulness of traditional fun-only game design.

    What’s Next

    In Week 2, we will begin:

    • Collecting examples for early interaction concepts — focusing on mechanics that generate observable behaviors.
    • Sketching initial experience flows that balance playful context and structured decision points.
    • Starting to map potential data collection moments inside gameplay.
    • Drafting key design questions for advisors and clients to clarify research direction.

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