Mission
This concept stemmed from a personal experience teaching English to middle schoolers at a local cram school in Japan. The education system in Japan holds a very similar curriculum in local schools throughout the country, which starts English education from 6th grade. I was shocked at how many students who told me English was their weakest field by far and how it’s a complete pain in the neck to study compared to maths and sciences. I wanted to take a critical look into why these phenomenons seem to emerge and how we can get kids in Japan to enjoy the process of learning English.
When looking at the English syllabus of middle schoolers, there were mainly 2 standout problems that lead to children learning to hate the subject:
Heavy focus on grammar rules and sentence structure and very little room to learn vocabulary
Lack of focus on practical daily use leading to bad pronunciation
When coming to learning English, the purpose and reasoning of saying things becomes more important especially in a practical sense, as you are learning the original culture of the language simultaneously as you learn the language itself. The context and reason to why certain words come out in certain locations was a key area to focus on.
The Lexicon aims to create a fun and engaging learning experience for the Japanese middle schoolers that incorporates using english in an everyday manner using mobile phones as a device. The device will set you up with a personal AI tutor friend, whom you could customize their personality and appearance. Augmented reality is implemented to add a vocabulary scanning function that allows smooth translation into Japanese when needed, along with organizing these words into vocabulary cards that could be referred back to whenever they are studying. Processes of testing is done through AR technology where the word you scan gets represented as a vector character, giving the words a certain form to associate with. Your goal in the test is to fight these characters and collect coins that they drop which you can convert into clothings for your tutor.