Design considerations for tangible and embodied learning

Abstract

Recent developments in tangible and mobile technologies, including touch screens, sensors embedded in smartphones or other wearable devices, and so on, create potentially very interesting opportunities for forms of learning that combine sensorimotor representations arising from first person physical activity, with visual and auditory digital representations. When such technologies are embedded in social situations, they also create interesting representational topologies in which some of the user/learner's actions are observable by others but not necessarily the consequences of their activities in terms of digital representations. So, the shareability of learners' actions and their consequences with peers in collaborative learning contexts is constrained by some of the physical design features of these devices, and what is an advantage for an individual learner (small, personal, portable) can produce trade-offs in terms of opportunities for communication and group learning. In this talk I will present an analysis of some of these design constraints in terms of what they might afford for pedagogical design of embodied collaborative learning activities in young children, drawing upon a number of examples from my own and others' work. The analysis will also draw upon a number of theoretical approaches, including distributed cognition, physical distributed learning, embodied cognition and learning, and recent theories in HCI concerning so-called spectator interfaces.