The Mighty Ducks

Coaching & Coding

The Mighty Ducks

The mighty Ducks evolved over time – it was a small internal Project at FHNW in the beginning but it grew and grew …

Eventually, the mighty Ducks asked a standard set of questions to over 18’000 children in the canton Aargau in Switzerland. This is quite an amazing data set now, the questions address gender, age, support of the teacher over time in the canton Aargau and are a valuable resource now, whether interventions in the field of teaching had any effect in the perception of the children.

To us, the Duck project until today is still one of those heart projects that as a programmer you can’t let go, because it does have a clear and observable impact on the daily practice at schoolds – it’s a window into the young minds and we can understand a little bit better what they think.

Together with the Design Artist, a second set of Pictures was designed this time with Monkeys – now the Monkeys are not in the field yet, because the Speech Engine “OpenMary” was somehow not up to the Task – for a while it sounded like Terminator Arnold would ask the Questions – this year, the output got much much better – so we are on the task of integrating OpenMary, the Monkeys into a custom questionnaire tool, suited for children.

 

 

 

 

By detecting the amplitude of the played mp3 questions we managed to lip-sync the graphics – this small aspect of the project should now be ported to either HTML or Unity – thats the choice ahead …

 

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