Revisiting Turtles and Termites: an Open-ended Interactive Physical Game with Multiple Robots

Abstract

We present a first prototype of an open-ended interactive physical game aiming at developing children's understanding of dynamic systems in a playful and embodied way. We use a swarm user interface, Zooids, developed by Le Goc et al., made of independent self-propelled elements that move collectively and react to user input. Papert promoted an active way of developing a computational literacy, through programming a turtle with LOGO, from which Resnick proposed StarLogo, a "multi-turtles" language to simulate complex systems behaviors. Our interface is positioned in between these two perspectives: it allows to physically interact with multiple "turtles", each having its own dynamic. Each Zooid can be assigned an action that will affect the system behavior. Based on this principle, our first prototype invites children to resolve situations by changing individual actions in a dynamic system.