Abstract-This paper describes a learning experience held with a class of primary school children who were introduced to a novel class of resources, named smart materials, and the interfaces built with them (Smart Material Interfaces). The pupils were guided along a multidisciplinary educational path in which traditional and innovative teaching methods were composed for educating while engaging the children. It led to the creation of 6 automated puppet plays focused on the themes of environmental awareness as a result. In this process, storytelling and visual programming acted as powerful means for merging different educational concepts and techniques. The children's engagement and the educational impact were evaluated during and after of the experience, revealing interesting results. The data collected through the direct observation and the questionnaires indicate that the experience was perceived as a positive and interesting. The post evaluation, held some months later, revealed improvements in all the areas involved by the multidisciplinary experience, from the knowledge of the properties of smart materials and the programming skills, to the increase of the environmental awareness and the skills for text analysis.Keywords: Arduino, computer supported education, origami, smart material interface, Scratch, storytelling, visual programming.
I. MOTIVATIONEducators should be able to offer up-to-date educational paths capable of integrating the novelties of science and technology with the engagement of the pupils for improved learning. Smart materials represent a novel and interesting technological topic to teach and learn. They can change their physical properties (for example color, shape, stiffness and so forth) and they can be manipulated and controlled through different hardware platforms (e.g. Arduino) for the creation of interesting and engaging interfaces (i.e. Smart Material Interfaces, SMIs). The interest of this exploratory study lays in the introduction of these complex technology topics in the Primary School and on the design of an interdisciplinary educational path supporting this goal. For reaching this goal the educational experience included scientific, technical, artistic topics and literacy skills, meant for engaging the children while educating them. It is important to underline that the topics that were introduced for stimulating the interest for the smart materials worked not just as a means but they were themselves a focus of interest. Storytelling, which has long DOI reference number: 10.18293/DMS2015-013 been recognised as a powerful means for engaging children in educational contexts, was used in this work as a glue for connecting the different educational topics. Storytelling provided an overall goal to the students' work: the creation of stories focused on environmental awareness themes. In this experience the children were challenged in the creation of origami 1 models as elements of a story. These elements were augmented with smart materials and programmed to act as the stories created...