Youtopia

Abstract

Youtopia is a hybrid tangible and multi-touch land use planning activity for elementary school aged children. It was implemented on a Microsoft Pixelsense digital tabletop. The main method of interaction is through physical stamp objects that children use to "stamp" different land use types onto an interactive map. Youtopia was developed to investigate issues surrounding how to design and evaluate children's collaborative learning applications using digital tabletops. In particular we are looking at how the interface design supports in depth discussion and negotiation between pairs of children around issues in sustainable development. Our primary concern is to investigate questions about codependent access points, which may enable positive interdependence among children. Codependent access points are characteristics that enable two or more children to participate and interact together. In Youtopia these implemented through sequences of stamps that are required for successful interaction, which can be assigned to children (codependent mode) or remain unassigned (independent mode).

Empathic Robot for Group Learning

“…Furthermore, according to Antle et al [2015], sustainability curricula for elementary schools "often focus on key concepts such as balancing conservation and consumption" [Antle et al 2015, p. 37], while ignoring the important role that children's personal values have in learning. They argue that sustainability education for elementary school-aged children should be modeled according to the Emergent Dialogue Model, especially in the area of digital media games such as Youtupia [Antle et al 2013]. The core idea of the Emergent Dialogue Model is that children should be invited to participate in personally meaningful dialogues during the game play.…”

“…Using the dedicated software ELAN v4.8.1 [Wittenburg et al 2006], each study session was coded for behavioral analysis using the video recordings of the participants while performing the collaborative group learning activity. We have based our coding scheme on the one created by Antle et al [2013], for the analysis of the Emergent Dialogue Model. We were interested in the analysis of the verbal behavior of the participants during the learning activity to be able to gain insights into their meaningful participation in discussions of personal values as a way to measure learning outcomes.…”

The Design of Robothings : Non-Anthropomorphic and Non-Verbal Robots to Promote Children’s Collaboration Through Play

“…Even more challenging is the ability to endow simple, low-cost, sturdy, and versatile robots with the computing power necessary to recognize children's behaviors and appropriately engage with them in play. However, the playful-paradigm might be able to (i) enable embodied pedagogies and tangible learning, proven as beneficial for children's development [12], (ii) favor inclusiveness bridging the interaction between typically and non-typically developed children by focusing on non-verbal interaction grounded in social play and (iii) integrate school curricula with topics that are not often covered by teachers, like socio-emotional learning, creativity, and playful learning. Social robots come in many forms and communicate with children thanks to various behaviors [18].…”

“…Digital and interactive technology have the advantage to offer interactive applications for children's collaboration and collaborative play beyond the school environment [315,335]. Interventions for children's collaboration, prosocial behaviors and collaborative play in CCI vary: from conversational agents [301] to computer games [166,282] from multi-touch tables to tangibles [139,296,12,419].…”

“…While the interaction with virtual agents is limited to one-child one interface interaction, multi-touch tables and tablets afford multi-party interaction [12]. Children play games or work on digital learning tasks through multitouch systems.…”