EQtainment, a leader in fun, engaging, age-appropriate products to build a child’s Emotional Quotient, has just raised the bar with their new “Q Moment AR,” which is a Merge cube paired with your device using their app to help kids learn about and discuss emotions and their consequences. Four options, Emotions, Language, Social and EQ Scrubber, are provided for play and discussion. As we scanned the cube with our iPhone, kids immediately responded to the animated characters representing six emotions on each side of the cube–purple fearful, blue sad, yellow happy, red mad, grey boredom and green disgust. “That is awesome!” “This is pretty cool!” A little crowd gathered around from their first grade classroom. They started to identify the character’s emotion and talk about how they came to that conclusion. “Happy is smiling.” “He’s angry and mad, red, stomping. His arms are mad. Him’s eyebrows are going down, like crazy!” “He’s left out and lonely, grey, feeling sad.” Tap on a character and you see six situations that demonstrate that emotion. The kids just carried on their own conversation. “Purple is scared, he’s shaking.” The animation of the purple character standing in front of a microphone elicited, ” He’s scared of a speech, of singing in front of 5.000 people. We’re going to be in front of 5,00o people tomorrow. (They had just showed me all their costumes and told me about their first grade play they were putting on tomorrow in front of the whole school). Then I listened to a girl encourage the one who said she was scared. The animated situations continues to elicit great conversations about situations familiar to the kids, “TV is really scary sometimes and I have to go under a blanket.” They also worked independently with the cube as I overheard, “What place is he (Mad) in?” “Second.” “Why is he mad if he got second place?” Good question!! Two of the characters are less obvious, grey Boredom and green Disgust. It was fun to watch the kids describe them and arrive at their conclusions. “The grey guy is bored, just sitting on the couch and doing nothing.” “The green guy is scared, stinky!” The Language category shows the emotion characters in 3 different settings, inviting conversation about what they are doing and how and why they feel that way. The Social category shows several positive social behaviors, playing cooperatively, helping a friend get up, high fives, etc. The last category, EQ Scrubber, shows each character demonstrating his emotion through a familiar activity. Tapping into kids’ fascination with augmented reality and technology, this Q Moment AR can be an amazingly effective tool in helping build kids’ language skills to support their growth in emotional intelligence, to positively navigate life and help others to do so too!
Available in iTunes. Click here.
