Supporting Reflection and Classroom Orchestration with Tangible Tabletops

Tangible tabletop systems have been extensively proven to be able to enhance participation and engagement as well as enable many exciting activities, particularly in the education domain. However, it remains unclear as to whether students really benefit from using them for tasks that require a high level of reflection. Moreover, most existing tangible tabletops are designed as stand-alone systems or devices. Increasingly, this design assumption is no longer sufficient, especially in realistic learning settings. Due to the technological evolution in schools, multiple activities, resources, and constraints in the classroom ecosystem are now involved in the learning process. The way teachers manage technology-enhanced classrooms and the involved activities and constraints in real-time, also known as classroom orchestration, is a crucial aspect for the materialization of reflection and learning. This thesis aims to explore how educational tangible tabletop systems affect reflection, how reflection and orchestration are related, and how we can support reflection and orchestration to improve learning. It presents the design, implementation, and evaluations of three tangible tabletop systems – the DockLamp, the TinkerLamp, and the TinkerLamp 2.0 – in different learning contexts. Our experience with these systems, both inside and outside of the laboratory, results in an insightful understanding of the impacts of tangible tabletops on learning and the conditions for their effective use as well as deployment. These findings can be beneficial to the researchers and designers of learning environments using tangible tabletop and similar interfaces.

Cellulo: Tangible Haptic Swarm Robots for Learning

Ayberk Özgür

Robots are steadily becoming one of the significant 21st century learning technologies that aim to improve education within both formal and informal environments. Such robots, called Robots for Learning, have so far been utilized as constructionist tools or social agents that aided learning from distinct perspectives. This thesis presents a novel approach to Robots for Learning that aims to explore new added values by means of investigating uses for robots in educational scenarios beyond those that are commonly tackled: We develop a platform from scratch to be "as versatile as pen and paper", namely as composed of easy to use objects that feel like they belong in the learning ecosystem while being seamlessly usable across many activities that help teach a variety of subjects. Following this analogy, we design our platform as many low-cost, palm-sized tangible robots that operate on printed paper sheets, controlled by readily available mobile computers such as smartphones or tablets. From the learners' perspective, our robots are thus physical and manipulable points of hands-on interaction with learning activities where they play the role of both abstract and concrete objects that are otherwise not easily represented. We realize our novel platform in four incremental phases, each of which consists of a development stage and multiple subsequent validation stages. First, we develop accurately positioned tangibles, characterize their localization performance and test the learners' interaction with our tangibles in a playful activity. Second, we integrate mobility into our tangibles and make them full-blown robots, characterize their locomotion performance and test the emerging notion of moving vs. being moved in a learning activity. Third, we enable haptic feedback capability on our robots, measure their range of usability and test them within a complete lesson that highlights this newly developed affordance. Fourth, we develop the means of building swarms with our haptic-enabled tangible robots and test the final form of our platform in a lesson co-designed with a teacher. Our effort thus contains the participation of more than 370 child learners over the span of these phases, which leads to the initial insights into this novel Robots for Learning avenue. Besides its main contributions to education, this thesis further contributes to a range of research fields related to our technological developments, such as positioning systems, robotic mechanism design, haptic interfaces and swarm robotics.

EPFL2018

Tangible Interfaces for Learning

Sébastien Cuendet

There have been many claims that Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can have a positive impact on learning. Alleged benefits include increasing usability, improving engagement and collaboration of students, and providing a better perception of the task, especially spatial ones. However, there exists little empirical data to back up these claims. Moreover, for all their potential benefits for learning, TUIs are still scarcely used in schools. This thesis explores these two issues in the specific context of vocational education and training of carpenter apprentices. The learning objectives concern spatial skills and in particular, the mapping between 2D and 3D representations. We study (1) whether TUIs can support the training of spatial skills, and if so what features allow them to do so, and (2) what kinds of classroom pedagogical scenarios TUIs can support. We follow a design-based research approach and run empirical studies, mostly in classrooms. The contributions of this thesis touch on three research domains:

Spatial skills. Our results show that TUIs can help teach spatial skills to carpenter apprentices. The tangible nature of TUIs can help the learner relate multiple representations of an object, especially for difficult problems. It can also lower the barrier to entry into a learning domain for beginners.
Learning with TUIs. According to our results, TUIs can benefit learning, but the mere fact of using TUIs does not guarantee learning. Instead, special attention needs to be given to the design of the TUI. Small design variations, such as the physical correspondence between the tangible object and its virtual representations, or the type and timing of feedback given to the user, can have a significant impact on learning.
Classroom technologies and orchestration. We explore several classroom pedagogical scenarios that TUIs can support. The most promising one is to use a TUI as part of a hybrid classroom learning activity that includes both TUI and non TUI steps. Additionally, we devise two ways to promote the integration of TUIs in classroom. First, we introduce 5 design principles that reduce the classroom orchestration load. Second, we show how new web technologies can be used to deploy TUIs in schools at a lower cost.

EPFL2013

Learner-Computer Interaction

Pierre Dillenbourg, Kshitij Sharma

Learner-Computer Interaction (LCI) research addresses the design, development and use of interactive technologies to support and amplify human learning. LCI is based on the rationale that learning while interacting with technology is a complex, multi-layered phenomenon, thus, designing the conditions for engaging in meaningful learning is vital in the 21st century, yet, it remains a challenging process. LCI developments are expected to contribute towards a coherent new, high-impact way of understanding and building learner-centered interaction concepts to support the design of future learning environments. LCI provides an interdisciplinary playground for researchers and professionals across all areas of learning technologies, psychology, learning science and human computer interaction (NCI), with an ultimate objective of providing a forum at the intersection of these topical areas. LCI aims to develop a critical discussion, debate and co-development of ideas and approaches about the next generation of learning environments and their interaction design capacities, the form of these capacities and the way they can be identified, utilized and enhanced to help us improve the contemporary learning technologies and users' learning experience.

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018