Conversations and discussions in classrooms among children and with teachers are an important part of a learning environment. Social Learning (SL) curricula place special emphases on using conversations as learning tools to teach children positive social norms. Smart tangible objects, brie y, tangibles can help sca old such conversations by promoting a multimodal experience. The presented PhD research aims at creating such tangibles. The design process is participatory, based on action-research: prototype solutions are rapidly developed; these are used by users and experts of the SL domain in the eld, and their usage is reected over to stir design directions or uncover design possibilities. This DC paper reports on the evolution of tangible prototypes: it shows how new design ideas emerged by moving designers into the eld and making users adopt prototype solutions in their environment.
1.1
Social Learning (SL) aims at teaching children positive social behaviours [
Literature shows that tangible interaction design (ID) solutions could greatly
help both learners and educators in conversation-based SL, by adding
interactivity and data-logging, which can sustain the adoption of social interaction norms
and the re ection about conversation behaviours, e.g., [
The design of such SL tangibles is however complex as it should consider
their usability, experience of children, besides how to support the sca olding of
social interaction norms. In view of that, it is not surprising that the existing
body of work in interaction design for SL is still in early stages, according to the
literature review in [
Therefore the main research question of the PhD is as follows.
How to design tangibles for children's conversations and SL, for their school context, and assess them over time? 1.2
To answer the PhD research question, and considering the issues mentioned in
previous section, a meta-design approach is adopted for developing SL tangibles
for conversations among children. The design approach crucially involves users,
mainly teachers and primary school children, and relevant stakeholders, mainly
SL experts, in their learning contexts, over time [
The design process takes the form of an action-research process, spiraling
through the (1) rapid development of tangibles, (2) and actions with eld studies
for (3) re ecting about users' usage of tangibles [
In the rst PhD year, we developed TurnTalk, a playful tangible for
supporting and enhancing the turn-sharing rule in co-located face-to-face group
discussions in classroom, by stimulating di erent learning modalities|visual, auditory,
tactile, kinesthetic. Its design and usage in the eld are reported in [
The paper is organised as follows. Related research is brie y recapped in the opening. Then the paper comes to its core matters and presents the evolution of two novel design solutions, stemming from the usage of TurnTalk in the eld.
Interactive solutions for teams of adults. The majority of interactive
solutions for mediating group conversations have been developed with a focus on
adults at work environments. These solutions tend to record the interaction
between participants, and provide feedback based on it in order to promote self
or group re ection. Examples are Conversation Clock [
However group conversations with children in classrooms are di erent. For
instance, they are highly dynamic and, if not structured with, e.g., scripts, they
also tend to be highly chaotic: children's voices tend to overlap, not
respecting turns in conversations; some children tend to dominate the conversation
and leave out less prominent members, e.g., [
Therefore, interactive solutions developed for adults' meetings in group at
work places cannot be directly used for children in classrooms. Some solutions
like Teacher's Dashboard [
Besides the visual modality, di erent other modalities for feedback about
conversation progress have also been investigated. Grouper, for instance, is meant
for coordinating team work [
Technology-enhanced solutions for conversations among university students
have been designed and evaluated in eld studies [
Video-conversation solutions. In some instances, a child may be at home
or have frequent stays in a hospital due to illness. For such scenarios,
videoconversation or remote-presence solutions can be useful. Interactivity seems to
be the key for such solutions [
Di erent prototypes and solutions discussed above focus on di erent parts rather than the whole solution for supporting conversations for children's SL. However, each sets the ground for the design of di erent aspects of the proposed design solution which is discussed in the next sections. 3
TurnTalk was initially developed as a tool to support and promote SL based
conversations for small groups of children of age group 8{10 in classrooms. TurnTalk
for co-located conversations has been used with di erent SL experts and children
in learning environments, e.g., [
The solutions evolving from TurnTalk and proposed in this paper stem from
interviews with SL experts or teachers, as well as designers' observations of
children or teachers in their own environment, playfully engaged for design
purposes like in [
The original TurnTalk prototype consisted of a pentagon shaped tabletop
device for conversations in small groups, of 3 to maximum 5 children [
The play-card mechanism is enabled as follows. The top cover of the pentagon is split into 5 sectors, one for each child. Children can tangibly play a card and so take or reserve their turn to speak. This mechanism is enforced by a visual feedback of LED pins, which relies on the semaphore metaphor: the current speaker's pin lights up in green color; another speaker's LED pin ashes yellow if he or she has reserved the next turn, any other will light up red.
The progression feedback is about the conversation behaviour. In the end of the conversation, the progression in conversation is visually displayed as follows: the LED bars on top of the TurnTalk light up for each child proportionally to the number of turns taken by him/her and then to the amount of time taken to talk, with a di erent color.
Other design features are implemented in TurnTalk so as to support educators' and children's re ections and assessment of conversation behaviours, but they are not detailed in this paper because they are less relevant here.
The newer version of TurnTalk with the TTapp mobile prototype advanced in this paper consists of: (1) the main tangible device, TurnTalk described above, enhanced with audio and video support; (2) a linked mobile app called TTapp. TurnTalk is used in the classroom while the TTapp is used at the remote location of the child, away from the classroom.
In TurnTalk and TTapp alike, the interaction behaviours of the play-card mechanism and progression feedback are synchronised as explained and illustrated in the following.
In the novel TurnTalk, there is a ring of 5 microphones, one per side of the pentagon facing children. Moreover, cameras are also placed around the device.
In case the speaker is in classroom, the predominant mic and the active camera are those of the child with the speaking turn, that is, the one with the play-card inserted and with the LED pin ashing green in the TurnTalk device. This way the remote user can focus on the voice and facial expression of the person who is talking.
In case it is the remote user herself speaking, the non-mu ed mic and the active camera in the TurnTalk device are of the user with the reserved turn to talk, e.g., so as to catch visual cues concerning her willingness to continue the conversation.
In case there are no reservations, the mic and camera of TurnTalk remain on the most recent speaker in classroom.
The interaction behaviour of the mobile TTapp closely resembles that of the TurnTalk device; see Fig. 2. In the device, we have tangible play-cards to book turns. In the app, these are represented by a play-card button which the user can select (e.g, tap) to take a turn to speak or to reserve the next turn. The app screen also shows a pentagon with the same shape as the physical TurnTalk. It also shows the user LEDs to indicate next and current turn and the progression feedback at the end of a conversation.
The progression feedback delivered after the conversation is also mirrored on both TurnTalk and TTapp to show conversation distribution in terms of number of turns and turn times. See Fig. 2. The repeated-measure study in a cooperative learning primary school opened up a new design possibilities: turning TurnTalk into a device for orchestrating class conversations, after group discussions.
During the study, a practice common in the school emerged. When the time for the group conversation is over, all groups have to present the results of their discussion to the class and the teacher, who acts as moderator. Turns in the class conversation are taken by raising hands. A pebble can be given by the teacher to assign speaking turns.
However, turns are often not respected, in spite of pebbles. Teachers may not see children out of their line of sight and, again, groups with dominant members get more often speaking turns.
ClassTalk evolves TurnTalk into a design solution for these discovered issues. The class has one TurnTalk device per group. During the class conversation, when groups' results are reported, TurnTalk devices are connected to a master tangible device. This helps the teacher orchestrate the class conversation. The play-card mechanism of TurnTalk is maintained: a group member can take the turn in speaking on behalf of his group by placing the card in the group's TurnTalk device. If the LED strips of TurnTalk ash green, then the child has the turn on behalf of his group. If the LED strips ash yellow, then the child has booked the next turn for his group. Otherwise the group has to await for the other groups to nish their interventions. See the example illustration in Fig. 3.
A rst version of the ClassTalk prototype was brought into the aforementioned primary school classroom and used in the class conversation, reporting on groups' results. The usage stirred novel design possibilities, related to the role of teachers. During the class conversation, the class teacher wished to stop and re ect on a point made by a group but the ClassTalk prototype at that stage, did not allow for that. The newer version picks up the challenge and implements more features through a special teacher card which can be used also for intervention as well as for booking turns in a normal fashion implemented previously.
The paper reports a PhD research work in the second year, revolving around tangibles for children's conversations and SL. The paper describes the PhD research main question and methodology, with a design process that spirals through rapid prototypes and actions in the eld, where users' use prototypes and designers re ect with users over the usage.
It presents the PhD rst year's tangible solution for group conversations in primary schools, TurnTalk, and it shows how the adopted design process led to novel design possibilities, explored in this second year of the PhD: one for blended SL; one for supporting not only group conversations but also class conversations.
The meta-design and modular design of TurnTalk, with rapid prototyping, made it possible to rapidly introduce new features according to the discovered design possibilities.
The last year of the PhD will cumulate over the design experiences and actions in the eld in order to formulate guidelines for the meta-design of tangibles for conversation-based SL for schools.
I thank my Ph.D. advisors G. Dodero and R. Gennari, as well as A. Melonio for their supervision work.