Smart Toys plus plus : Exploiting the Social Connectedness for Playing and Learning

Under the umbrella of smart toys, a myriad of interactive systems have addressed a variety of scenarios considering entertainment, education, sustainability, social and environmental learning through play. Tangibles and small toy robots prevail; but interaction technology based on wearables, conversational interfaces or augmented reality may also be part of this landscape to implement smart toys that are both social and/or connected. In the second edition of this workshop, we set a special focus on challenges associated to opening smart toys to different degrees of "connectedness", and reflecting on concerns regarding data privacy and ethics when smart toys are reframed to function in a connected way. After the pandemic, social isolation forced us to change the way we interact with each other. We are convinced that smart technologies can open new avenues for promoting social connectedness enabling more interactive playing and learning activities.

Paper Interfaces: an HCI Approach to Geometry Education

Quentin Bonnard

Paper interfaces are an alternative for controlling a computer. Typically, users interact with pieces of paper which are detected by a camera and augmented with relevant information by a projector. The development of paper interfaces, historically, aimed at merging digital and physical versions of documents, enabling to transparently work on one or the other. Furthermore, in the new era of natural interaction techniques, the special affordances of paper can be of great value as a basis for tangible interaction and Augmented Reality: digital objects, linked to paper artefacts, can be manipulated by folding, cutting, orienting, etc. In the context of classroom technologies, paper interfaces are especially appropriated, because paper is integrated and ubiquitous in the school environment and learning processes. Students and teachers are familiar with its properties and know how to interact with it. The goal of this dissertation is to explore the possibilities of using paper as a support for the learning content and more importantly as a tangible body. We focus on geometry education at primary school, because it is a domain where these two aspects of paper can be extensively exploited: pupils can write formulas or draw figures, and they can also move cardboard shapes, or fold along symmetry axes. We designed five series of pedagogical activities: classifying quadrilaterals, mastering the protractor, communicating angles, exploring symmetries, and describing physical transformations with geometrical concepts. These activities are experimented in increasingly valid settings, such that the last series took place in regular classrooms. We also developed methods to analyse the learning activity happening during these experimentations. Our studies revealed important insights on paper interfaces and their application in classroom education. The variety of collaborative scripts that could be created shows the flexibility of paper as a material for building user interfaces that support pedagogical designs. Such flexibility can be further exploited to enable teachers to create their own pedagogical Augmented Reality applications. We also observed many examples of uses that were not intended in the original design, which we refer to as “creative appropriation”. As a result, our paper interfaces were integrated in the everyday conditions of the classroom, used intuitively by the pupils, and managed autonomously by the teachers.

EPFL2012

Augmented Reality to Facilitate a Conceptual Understanding of Statics in Vocational Education

Lorenzo Lucignano

At the core of the contribution of this dissertation there is an augmented reality (AR) environment, StaticAR, that supports the process of learning the fundamentals of statics in vocational classrooms, particularly in carpentry ones. Vocational apprentices are expected to develop an intuition of these topics rather than a formal comprehension. We have explored the potentials of the AR technology for this pedagogical challenge. Furthermore, we have investigated the role of physical objects in mixed-reality systems when they are implemented as tangible user interfaces (TUIs) or when they serve as a background for the augmentation in handheld AR. This thesis includes four studies. In the first study, we used eye-tracking methods to look for evidences of the benefits associated to TUIs in the learning context. We designed a 3D modelling task and compared users' performance when they completed it using a TUI or a GUI. The gaze measures that we analysed further confirmed the positive impact that TUIs can have on the learners' experience and enforced the empirical basis for their adoption in learning applications. The second study evaluated whether the physical interaction with models of carpentry structures could lead to a better understanding of statics principles. Apprentices engaged in a learning activity in which they could manipulate physical models that were mechanically augmented, allowing for exploring how structures react to external loads. The analysis of apprentices' performance and their gaze behaviors highlighted the absence of clear advantages in exploring statics through manipulation. This study also showed that the manipulation might prevent students from noticing aspects relevant for solving statics problems. From the second study we obtained guidelines to design StaticAR which implements the magic-lens metaphor: a tablet augments a small-scale structure with information about its structural behavior. The structure is only a background for the augmentation and its manipulation does not trigger any function, so in the third study we asked to what extent it was important to have it. We rephrased this question to whether users would look directly at the structure instead of seeing it only through a tablet. Our findings suggested that a shift of attention from the screen to the physical object (a structure in our case) might occur in order to sustain users' spatial orientation when they change positions. In addition, the properties of the gaze shift (e.g. duration) could depend on the features of the task (e.g. difficulty) and of the setup (e.g. stability of the augmentation). The focus of our last study was the digital representation of the forces that act in a loaded structure. From the second study we observed that the physical manipulation failed to help apprentices understanding the way the forces interact with each other. To overcome this issue, our solution was to combine an intuitive representation (springs) with a slightly more formal one (arrows) which would show both the nature of the forces and the interaction between them. In this study apprentices used the two representations to collaboratively solve statics problems. Even though apprentices had difficulties in interpreting the two representations, there were cases in which they gained a correct intuition of statics principles from them. In this thesis, besides describing the designed system and the studies, implications for future directions are discussed.

EPFL2018

Designing Augmented Reality for the Classroom

Quentin Bonnard, Sébastien Cuendet, Pierre Dillenbourg

Augmented reality (AR) has recently received a lot of attention in education. Multiple AR systems for learning have been developed and tested through empirical studies often conducted in lab settings. While lab studies can be insightful, they leave out the complexity of a classroom environment. We developed three AR learning environments that have been used in genuine classroom contexts, some of them being now part of classroom regular practices. These systems and the learning activities they provide have been co-designed with teachers, for their own classrooms, through multiple cycles of prototyping and testing. We present here the features that emerged from these co-design cycles and abstract them into design principles. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.