Play Platforms for Children’s Creativity

Abstract

Like Fröbel, Maria Montessori highlighted the importance of using objects and actively engaging in exploring the environment. Montessori's method, based on the Didactic Materials, addressed the stimulation of every sense (Montessori, 1912), and the design principle behind each of the objects from the Didactic Materials set, was to raise children's interest and curiosity. 2.1. Digital Manipulatives Recent technological developments made it possible to embed computational technology in objects, creating a new interaction paradigm with digital technology. Digital manipulatives 1 (Resnick et al., 1998) also referred to as tangible interfaces-TUIs (Ishii & Ullmer, 1997; Ullmer & Ishii, 2001) or tangible systems provide a more natural interaction, stimulating sensory and whole body perception, giving users freedom of movements, while creating richer experiences. Research has shown that physical manipulation greatly improves comprehension (Glenberg, 2010; Glenberg et al., 2011), and that digital manipulatives have the potential to expand the range of concepts that children understand (

Investigating the use of digital manipulatives for storytelling in pre-school

“…Whilst it is beyond the scope of this paper to give a detailed description of the development process, in the following section we will briefly present some relevant insights that informed the design of the final interface. For more information the reader may refer to [3].…”

“…The study was structured in two main phases: the first one was dedicated to the design and implementation of the interface, and extended for a period of three years, involving six pre-school classes (ages five) and six preschool teachers [3]. Following the implementation, the researchers carried out three interventions at preschool for a period of around one year.…”

Untangling the complexity of designing tools to support tangible and digital intercultural story telling in troubled times: a case in point

“…Initial studies carried out with paper cards with drawings representing story elements and an A4 sheet of paper, simulating a system for creating stories, have shown that the children tended to place all the cards filling the sheet of paper (Sylla et al, 2015); follow up studies carried out with an electronic prototype with six slots for placing blocks representing story elements, showed that children wished to create longer stories in which they could use more story elements than it was possible with the prototype. From these observations we concluded that ideally a system would not offer too many possibilities so that children would not feel pressured to use all of them nor should it be too limited.…”

Rethinking children's co-creation processes beyond the design of TUIs

“…Aspects that have been investigated include the design of playful interactions focusing on learning [17,26], storytelling [11,8,12], dynamic systems [27], collaboration [23,25], or the learning of social skills [15] among others. Children's contributions and experiences in co-design activities [19,20,18,24], as well as reflections on roles and values of children in design [22] have also been topics of interest. Antle et al's Tangible Learning Design Framework (TLDF), is an example of a tool developed to support the design of TUIs [1,2] taking into account child development [3].…”