Tangible programming in formal and informal educational environments

• Authors: Michael S. Horn
• Venue: ICLS '10 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - Volume 2
• Year: 2010

Real-world learning environments are complex and often chaotic places. Teachers in classrooms must learn to balance the needs of anywhere from 15 to 30 students at a time with the demands of curriculum and the constraints of a regimented school day. In non-school environments such as science museums, the challenge is different. Program developers and exhibit designers must work without the structure and guidance provided by teachers and curriculum, devising activities and exhibits that engage a diverse audience and promote self-guided learning. For educators, the decision to incorporate computational learning activities in these setting can be fraught with risk (AAUW, 2000; Cuban, 2001). Teachers may feel a sense of loss of control and self-doubt about their own proficiency with technology (AAUW, 2000), and desktop computers, designed primarily as single-user productivity tools for businesses, can be less than ideal for many educational applications (Scott, Mandryk, & Inkpen, 2003). Likewise, in museums, although computer-based exhibits can be very engaging for individual visitors, they are often detrimental to the interactions of social groups as a whole (e.g. Hornecker & Stifter, 2006). For the past four years I have been exploring the potential of tangible interaction to address these issues. Here I briefly describe some of this work in both formal and informal educational settings. I conclude with a brief argument for a focus on creating hybrid tangible interfaces that combine tangible and graphical interaction into a single system, thus giving users the freedom to select an input modality to meet their current needs or preferences.