Feedback and Guidance to Support Children with Intellectual Disabilities in Discovery Learning with a Tangible Interactive Tabletop

By coupling dynamic digital representations to physical objects, tangible environments expand the possibilities for providing scaffolding in discovery learning processes. This is particularly promising in the case of children with intellectual disabilities, for whom the typical lack of structure of discovery-based activities is challenging. In this research, empirical studies were undertaken where children with intellectual disabilities engaged in a process of discovery using a tangible interactive tabletop, which provided a substantial amount of feedback. Two conditions of human mediation (free and guided exploration) were compared, to identify which one enabled more opportunities for discovery, in combination with design aspects of system feedback. Episodes of discovery were found to be much more frequent than episodes of disruption in both conditions, confirming the potential of tangible tabletops, in particular the importance of informational system feedback to learners' exploratory actions. Nevertheless, human mediation is still needed for children with intellectual disabilities despite the feedback capabilities of tangible environments. Although children explored more in free sessions (in terms of amount of exploratory actions), guided exploration produced more episodes of discovery, reinforcing the importance of external guidance for increasing the attention to learning concepts.