Hello. We are a team from LMU Munich.
Our research topic is ‘tangible interaction
for children’s creative learning: a review.’
Tangible learning emphasizes the use of children’s bodies
in educational practice.
It provides a new possibility to facilitate creative learning
through a natural interactive interface.
As we all know,
creativity is an essential skill for the 21st century
because it leads to knowledge construction and innovation.
And childhood is an important stage to develop creativity.
So it is an interesting and valuable research topic to explore
how tangible user interface stimulates children’s creativity.
Questions raised include:
In what context do children use TUIs for creative learning?
How have these TUIs facilitated creative learning?
And what are the challenges for designing and using TUIs in those contexts?
The review conducted in Dec 2020
using seven databases from three main research areas:
HCI, education, and psychology,
considering only English content published since 2015.
The keywords “tangible” and “creati*” were used for searching.
The search results were 643 papers.
Finally, 53 relevant papers were reviewed.
The result shows that
the most common contexts to use TUIs
for creative learning were
school, workshop, and museum.
The top three popular activities were
storytelling, robot programming, and music composition.
More studies had been done for older children
than younger ones.
In addition to age,
children’s gender also made a difference in their behaviors.
About the number of participants,
most studies were within 50.
There were around 86% of studies
conducted as cooperative teamwork.
Based on 53 reviewed papers,
we used affinity diagramming to classify influences
into six categories: scaffold novice,
support children’s cognitive process and development,
promote intrinsic motivation
by facilitating exploration and self-directed creation,
encourage children to break the boundary of disciplines
and keep an open mind,
build a collaborative and practical environment
where children can share space, objects, and ideas
to solve authentic problems.
These influences are corresponding to
five key components of creativity:
namely knowledge, cognitive ability, motivation,
the openness of personality, and environment.
For example, TADCAD enabled primary school students
to be immersed in 3D modeling
without worrying about technical details or risks.
Using CyberPLAYce, students were able to
organize data logically in physical space for problem-solving.
Bacpack presented children with the invisible micro-world
and display the long-term biological process
in a fast-forward manner.
So children can do bio-designs through spatially arranging
and comparing different combinations of objects.
We summarised three main opportunities for future work:
First, future research is expected to have
more empirical evidence with objective evaluation
to support and confirm the effectiveness of TUIs.
Second, according to different concerns
from TUI designers and teachers,
it is important to find the balance of
the abstractness, openness, and complexity in TUI design
and to create a smooth experience for children.
More importantly,
current researches overlooked the value of teachers,
so the teachers’ user experience are not good enough,
because their learning-cost is high
and their teaching methods might not be supported.
Three Possible Solutions are:
consider teachers’ need and involve them as co-designers;
provide tools, examples, and training to support them;
cooperate with teachers
to learn actual context and children’s characteristics.
The goal is to enable teachers to integrate TUIs
in educational activities easily and actively.
In this review, we have contributed to
providing an overall picture of the user contexts
and TUI effects on children’s creative learning.
It is worth noting that current TUI concepts for children
were essentially conducted by HCI researchers and designers
rather than teachers with substantial experience.
So We argue that future research should focus more on
the interdisciplinary nature of TUIs for creative learning
and leverage collaboration
between HCI researchers and school teachers.
Thank you for watching.