Introduction

What if you could draw anywhere? Sketchimals is a drawing game developed especially for children and it aims to help children recognize and draw different types of animals. It has high adaptability and it can be used with any gadget. Sketchimals offers options for drawing with a mouse, a touch screen or even with an IR pen. With the pen any wall can be your canvas. Sketchimals is built so that it can be adapted for drawing more than just animal pictures too. Sketchimals makes learning fun with the help of software development and neural networks.

Goal

The goal of the project was to invent something that would increase the use of the Aistikattila room, and the project was aimed to have educational value. The IR pen adaptation of Sketchimals was built specifically for the Aistikattila room, but it can be played without the room too.

Implementation

Sketchimals includes a main menu with a selection for the drawing mode as well as the main drawing canvas. The selection menu offers options for drawing with a mouse, with a touch screen or with an infrared pen. When the IR pen is chosen a menu for selecting the correct camera and calibrating the screen opens. After selecting the drawing method the drawing canvas opens. The drawing canvas offers selection for different pen colors. The colors that are possible to choose are black, blue, green and red. The canvas screen also offers an eraser and an option to clear the whole screen. When opened the game plays an animal sound. The player must draw the corresponding animal on the screen. After the drawing is done the AI model predicts what the drawn animal is. If the drawn animal is the correct one matching the heard sound the game gives the user a score based on how accurately the model predicted the animal. If the drawn animal didn’t match the sound the game tells the player what animal they were supposed to draw. The sound can be heard again by clicking on the corresponding button, and the next animal sound can be heard by clicking “Next”.

Future

Sketchimals can be developed in the future to include multiplayer mode. With this mode a scoreboard can also be added into the program, with an option to save the scores of the drawers. The neural network model used in our program can be trained with other than animal pictures to get it to recognize all types of different objects. The possibilities with Sketchimals are endless.

Video

Source code

Sketchimals is open source.