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Abstract-The Ministry of Education in Thailand is currently distributing tablets to all first year primary (Prathom 1) school children across the country as part of the government's "One Tablet Per Child" (OTPC) project to improve education. Early indications suggest that there are many unexplored issues in designing and implementing tablet activities for such a large and varied group of students and so far there is a lack of evaluation on the effectiveness of the tablet activities. In this article, the authors propose four challenges for the improving Thailand's OTPC project, consisting of: developing contextualised content, ensuring usability, providing teacher support, and assessing learning outcomes. A case study on developing science activities for first year primary school children on the OTPC devices is the basis for presenting possible solutions to the four challenges. In presenting a solution to the challenge of providing teacher support, an architecture is described for collecting data from student interactions with the tablet in order to analysis the current progress of students while in a live classroom setting. From tests in three local Thai schools, the authors evaluate the case study from both student and teacher perspectives. In concluding the paper, a framework for guiding mobile learning innovation is utilised to review the qualities and shortcomings of the case study.

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Conventionalprogramming paradigms have limitations where support for constructionist learning is concerned. This paper illustrates the merits of an alternative approach to giving support for constructionist learning, based on the principles of Empirical Modelling (EM), with reference to an algorithm from database theory. Effective modelbuilding for constructionist learning has to support activities relating to three roles: that of student, teacher and developer. This paper aims to show that EM brings far greater conceptual unity to interactions in these roles than is typically found in conventional approaches to educational software development.

The paper introduces an example of a 'distributed tangible technology' as a new type of technology that enables children in different physical locations to engage in physical interaction. A virtual tug of war game is an example of a distributed tangible technology that is played by groups of children pulling a rope from two separate locations. The game was launched when teams in Finland and South Africa competed during an international science festival. The paper describes the design and implementation of the tug of war game. It explores the challenges combining tangible user interfaces with distributed computing and distributed technologies to be overcome in future educational applications for children.