Beyond record and play: backpacks: tangible modulators for kinetic behavior

Digital Manipulatives embed computation in familiar children's toys and provide means for children to design behavior. Some systems use "record and play" as a form of programming by demonstration that is intuitive and easy to learn. With others, children write symbolic programs with a GUI and download them into a toy, an approach that is conceptually extensible, but is inconsistent with the physicality of educational manipulatives. The challenge we address is to create a tangible interface that can retain the immediacy and emotional engagement of "record and play" and incorporate a mechanism for real time and direct modulation of behavior during program execution. We introduce the Backpacks, modular physical components that children can incorporate into robotic creations to modulate frequency, amplitude, phase and orientation of motion recordings. Using Backpacks, children can investigate basic kinematic principles that underlie why their specific creations ex...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Hayes Raffle, Amanda J. Parkes, Hiroshi Ishii, Joshua Lifton
• Keywords: CHI 2006, Educational Manipulatives, Human Computer Interaction, Manipulatives Embed Computation, Tangible Interface