What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's' lives by using the power of design fiction.
Recent developmental studies state that nonsymbolic number representation (i.e., more-less comparisons) is important for math development, and children's judgment about such non-numerical magnitudes can be affected by sensory properties (i.e., volume, space). Yet, to our knowledge, there are no tangible based systems for training this math concept. Building on theories of cognition and learning, we developed MaR-T, a projector-camera setup. This paper is a step towards investigating the effects of projection-based mixedreality (MR) system with tangibles on nonsymbolic number representation of 3-to 5-year-old children. We present our user studies with a total of 14 participants, conducted to observe their interaction with the setup and the possible effects of our design on learning. The results indicate that MaR-T can provide active, engaging, and social learning, and our insights can inspire other interaction design and education studies.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing~ Mixed/augmented reality • Human-centered computing~ User interface design • Social and professional topics~ Children
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