Hello, I'm Jatin Arora.
This is a presentation for our paper: Design and evaluation of DIO construction toolkit
for Co-making shared constructions.
This project was completed by me and my co-authors: Kartik Mathur, Manvi Goel, Piyush Kumar and
Abhijeet Mishra under the guidance of Dr. Aman Parnami at
the Weave lab at IIIT Delhi, India.
So, DIO is a novel digital-physical construction toolkit to enable constructionist learning
for children from age groups of 8 to 12 years.
The toolkit comprises of tangible modules that provide a variety of input and output
functionalities.
Children can connect or associate these different input and output modules together to form
a variety of applications.
For instance, Input "button" module can be connected to an output "bulb" such that the
bulb module would glow whenever the button is pressed.
We designed the DIO modules such that they are suspend-able on bodies of multiple children
and in the environment This allows children to engage in multi-user
constructions as shown in the Illustrative diagrams.
In the paper, we show how this unique form-factor combined with the study procedures that we
had designed allows for a shared learning experience for the children.
This figure shows all the modules that we had fabricated.
The input modules include a button, a sunlight detector, a knob, a microphone, a motion sensor;
while the output modules include a bulb, a colorful bulb, a fan, a speaker, a number
display, and an emotion display.
Finally, there is an Adder to connect multiple input modules to one or more output modules.
The primary motivation of this work lies in the theory of Constructionism given by Dr.
Seymour Papert.
Papert had stated that children learn by making and creating things; things that are meaningful
to them and are shareable with other people.
DIO exemplifies this co-creative, collaborative learning process as visible in the images
on the right.
Another important concept is “Technological Fluency.”
Papert had established that children should not just use technology, but should become
fluent in making things with it.
DIO aims to help children gain technological fluency in 'The Internet of Things', a technology
that is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our current world.
The DIO input and output modules can be connected together using an Augmented Reality based
mobile application running on a smartphone.
The screenshot on the left shows the augmented representations for a "button" input module
and a "colorful bulb" output module as they are detected and scanned by the smartphone
camera.
One can also see the button on the top-right that allows the user to switch between the
front and the back cameras.
The screenshot on the right illustrates the process of connecting these modules or "making
a line" between the input and output.
The user can just slide their finger between the augmented modules to form a connection.
Once this connection is made in the smartphone application, it is replicated in the real
world using Bluetooth Low energy based wireless communication.
In this, the input modules behaves like a BLE Central and forms a wireless connection
with multiple, one or more output modules that behave as BLE peripherals.
Now looking at the module design.
Each Dio module includes a 3D printed enclosure with patterns for computer vision based recognition
by the smartphone.
Also included is a printed circuit board that houses the electronics responsible for the
input, output and the wireless communication functionalities of the module.
Also included is a detachable base that has attachments to suspend the module on the body
of the child or in the environment.
The figure on the right illustrates one example marker design that includes symbolic and logical
identifiers.
Symbolic identifiers help the user, the child identify the functionality of this module,
which is a “button” in this case while the Logical identifiers assist the computer
vision-based recognition by the algorithm.
We refined our design using an iterative design process and evaluated it on six research goals.
These research goals were chosen based on a comprehensive analysis of past work and
are rooted in toolkit usability, creative making by children, their collaboration, and
learning.
This evaluation was completed using a mixed-method based strategy that included questionnaires,
demos, open-ended and closed-ended making activities, and qualitative interviews.
Please refer to our paper for the details of our design, evaluation procedure and the
results.
I thank everyone for listening to this talk and I am open for any questions.