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Educators recognize that group work and physical involvement with learning materials can greatly enhance the understanding and retention of difficult concepts. As a result, math manipulatives-such as pattern blocks and number lines-have increasingly been making their way into classrooms and children's museums. Yet without the constant guidance of a teacher, students can easily become distracted, confused, or frustrated. This paper describes how math games with tangible user interfaces can address this need. Tangible user interfaces allow the students to work together in a physical environment, while the underlying computer system provides the guidance that a teacher would. This paper discusses pedagogical principles and an approach to designing and developing games that utilize tangible technologies. A library of functions, designed specifically for tracking visual tags in math games, is presented. The paper concludes with examples of math games that have been prototyped with this library.

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Reading in the wild

Kaplan

Chisik

Levy

2006

Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Interaction Design and Children

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Online reading, especially among children, is an understudied phenomenon. Thus designers of digital libraries and pedagogic tools for children generally lack deep knowledge about how to shape reading experiences so that they will be attractive for young audiences. Without a nuanced picture of children as readers, we are unlikely to develop systems responsive to their needs and desires. Participatory design coupled with studies of prototypes in natural conditions may help us create experiences that contribute to proficient literacy practices among children 10 to 14 years old. Our participatory design processes revealed that children this age highly value sharing their experiences and that reading sociably can introduce new pleasures. The current study uses the Alph prototype to study how one small group of children responds to its sociable literacy features.

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Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Letters to José: A Design Case for Building Tangible Interactive Narratives

Letters to José: A Design Case for Building Tangible Interactive Narratives

Tangible math

Reading in the wild

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