Mirror Mirror

Reflection is an important skill to navigate life, to overcome obstacles and to unlock your potential. People learn to reflect over time and some even struggle with it well into adulthood. Even otherwise, everyone needs some external prompting from time to time. This is all the more difficult for children as they depend on their surroundings, primarily parents and teachers to shape their reflective capacities. We learn to reflect when we see our parents, teachers and peers exhibit the behaviour out loud.

This project aims to facilitate independent development of such capacities in children while reducing the need and possible negative impact from adults in their lives. It uses an altered-self or altered self-model that exhibits such reflective traits. The child talks to the altered-self through a mirror (a bit meta, yes). The altered-self or the mirror-self primarily asks open ended questions to help the child make sense of their feelings, actions or experiences.

Initial testing went remarkably well when presented to both children and adults. One unforeseen outcome was how effective first person prompting turned out to be. There was no translation needed ‘How does this make you feel?’ → ‘How does this make me feel?’. This fundamentally altered their perception of the process, suggesting a highly promising avenue for further research and development.

The project also explores ‘children’s book’ as a possible form factor. Leveraging the inherent appeal of books to children and their potential to become a part of a daily routine, it is a promising and scalable product. The project hopes to equip children with the tools and skills necessary to become more resilient and self-sufficient individuals in an increasingly complex world.