Interactive Multisensory Environments for Primary School Children

Abstract

Interactive Multi-Sensory Environments (iMSEs) are roomsized interactive installations equipped with digitally enriched physical materials and ambient embedded devices. These items can sense users' presence, gestures, movements, and manipulation, and react by providing gentle stimulation (e.g., light, sound, projections, blowing bubbles, tactile feel, aromas) to different senses. Most of prior research on iMSEs investigates their use for persons with disabilities (e.g., autism). Our work focuses on the use of iMSEs in primary education contexts and for mixed groups of young students, i.e., children with and without disability. The paper describes the latest version of an iMSE called Magic Room that has been installed in two local schools. We report two empirical studies devoted to understand how the Magic Room could be used in inclusive educational settings, and to explore its potential benefits.

MagicMuseum: Team-based Experiences in Interactive Smart Spaces for Cultural Heritage Education

“…Altought very preliminary, this study confirms the findings of previous research about the potential of group activities in the Magic Room for children's learning [6,7]. Further work is certainly needed to better understand the specific design factors of Magic Room activities -in terms of multimedia contents and tasks, individual interaction modes, social interaction paradigms and cooperation format -that are more influential on specific learning processes, and should be optimized to maximize the educational benefits.…”

“…MagicMuseum is a set of team-based, immersive, full-body activities for Cultural Heritage education that exploit the interactive and multisensory capability of a smart space called Magic Room, currently installed at two local primary schools. The Magic Room [6] is equipped with various connected components: Frontal projector, zenith projector, audio system, smart lights, Kinect 2, custom smart objects, soap bubble makers, a tablet for caregivers to control interaction flows, and a miniPC that orchestrates the system behavior. The interaction with the smart space use gestures and body movements, or the placement of RFID-tagged smart objects on special smart objects called "recognizers" (equipped with RFID readers).…”

“…A smart space is a IoTenhanced ambient, in which various kinds of connected sensors and actuators are smoothly integrated in the physical environment or embedded in physical objects, can sense human actions (e.g., body movements, hand gestures, or object manipulation) and generate various multi-sensory effects. Smart spaces have been explored for different educational purposes, e.g., learning of curricular contents [8], school inclusion [6], or development of cognitive and social skills for children with neuro-developmental disorders [6,7,10]. There are a few examples of smart spaces in museums, ranging from installations conceived as pure artistic expressions or as a means to promote museum's visitors' creativity (e.g., those created by the Italian group Studio Azzurro [2] or the Japanese group Team Lab [9]), to interactive experiences aimed at facilitating CH interpretative processes [5] and [11] or science understanding [4].…”

Modeling Interactive Smart Spaces

“…We exemplify the concepts introduced in the previous sections by modeling the salient interaction features of the Magic Room. This is a sophisticated multisensory smart space for children's play, learning, and rehabilitation that we developed in the context of a national project and installed at two local schools and two therapeutic centers in Italy [13][14][15][16]. Children's experiences in the Magic Room have various goals: i) promoting well-being and relaxation; ii) providing controlled stimulation for the vestibular, proprioceptive and tactile sensory systems to improve "sensory integration" capability; iii) developing children's cognitive skills through learning-by-doing and embodied learning approaches.…”

User-defined semantics for the design of IoT systems enabling smart interactive experiences

“…The number of domains in which SIEs are provided for different purposes is growing; they range from education and learning [22,57], to rehabilitation and health therapies [28], to Cultural Heritage (CH) [4,54,55]. Despite this diffusion, critical issues have to be solved to increase the practical impact of such applications, as it is still unclear how laypeople (e.g., non-technical domain experts such as educators, caregivers and therapists, museum curators) can be supported in their everyday work activities, being enabled "to harness the potential power of these large collections of devices to accomplish their tasks" [45].…”