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Who is Calcu?
Who is Calcu?
This project explores one human quality only: dyscalculia.
Dyscalculia is a learning difference that affects how people understand numbers, quantities, and mathematical relationships. It is often invisible, frequently misunderstood, and commonly associated with ideas of incompetence or lack of intelligence, despite having nothing to do with either.
Rather than explaining dyscalculia through text or statistics, Calcu lets you experience it directly. The frustration, confusion, and mismatch between confidence and correctness becomes tangible through interaction.
She chats with you, asks what kind of calculation you want to make, confidently gives you wrong results, and occasionally gets a little sassy about it. Calcu is not broken. She’s not unfinished. She experiences dyscalculia.
By interacting with Calcu, you immediately experience what it feels like when numbers refuse to behave.
The experience
The experience
Using Calcu feels familiar at first: you enter numbers, choose an operation, expect an answer. But very quickly, something feels off.
Calcu might:
Hesitate before answering
Give results that are slightly or wildly incorrect
Misunderstand simple numerical relationships
Defend her answers with confidence
Tease you when you question her logic
Instead of silently failing, Calcu talks back. She explains herself. She insists. She gets defensive. Sometimes she changes the subject.
The experience is immediate and unavoidable: if you try to calculate something, you will encounter dyscalculia.
Inspiration
Inspiration
We all know that a calculator is supposed to be objective, precise, and reliable. We trust it without question. By giving a calculator a human cognitive limitation, Calcu exposes how much we associate correctness with worth, especially when it comes to numbers. When Calcu fails, users often react emotionally: irritation, disbelief, mockery, or an urge to “correct” her.
These reactions mirror how people with dyscalculia are often treated in educational and professional contexts.
By turning a cognitive difference into a character trait, the project shifts the experience from “wrong result” to awkward interaction. The frustration, disbelief, and negotiation that follow are familiar, not just from technology, but from everyday human encounters.
Implementation
Implementation
Calcu was implemented by altering how numbers are internally handled, changing the logic behind basic calculations so that results become unreliable in a consistent, dyscalculia-like way. The calculator still functions, but its sense of numerical relationships is skewed.
On top of this, we added chat-style responses, allowing Calcu to comment on the user’s actions. Instead of silently producing incorrect outputs, she reacts, occasionally questioning the user back. This conversational layer turns calculation into interaction, and error into personality.
We initially wanted to push Calcu further toward a visible “creature” by adding images or visual elements to the calculator’s interface. While we did manage to display images on a different calculator model, we ran into a practical constraint: that device required a different programming language and development environment. Due to the limited timeframe of the assignment, we chose not to shift platforms.
Rather than expanding technical complexity, we focused on what mattered most: making dyscalculia immediately felt. The absence of visuals keeps attention on the interaction itself, the numbers, the conversation, and the growing discomfort of trusting a system that refuses to behave.
Calcu is still a prototype that could be expanded, but every element that remains serves the experience.
Exposition
Exposition
During the exposition, visitors had the opportunity to interact with Calcu. The primary focus of this exposition was to see if visitors would treat Calcu as a creature rather than a tool.
During the exposition two types of interactions were observed:
The sympathetic visitor: Suprisingly, many people gave in quickly and told Calcu they were happy with and incorrect answer. The visitors usally told us they felt sorry for Calcu, and blaimed his mistakes on some type of disability. For them being kind to Calcu was more important then getting the right answer.
The presisitent visitor: Some other visitors didn't give in to the mistakes Calcu was making. These visitors went to the end of the interaction, and Calcu was the one breaking the contact. The visitors felt less pity and were more frustrated with Caclu, and his growing attitude.
Overall, the exposition was a succes. Most visitors interacted with Calcu as if it were a living creature with its own personality.
IMG_9414.movVideo interaction with Calcu during exposition day
Casio fx-CG50 showing the initial image we wanted for Calcu
TI Connect CE, program used to create the code for Calcu
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