Enhancing Collaboration and Facilitating Children's Learning Using TUIs: A Human-Centered Design Approach

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature already suggests that Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can support children learning. This paper presents a human-centered design approach of TUIs applied for reading tasks in the classroom for children aged 5 to 8 years. This approach is also supported by agile software and hardware development. We focused on language learning by building 3-letter words. We also discover the remarkable advantage of TUIs to support collaboration with teachers and the others children in the achievement of such tasks. We discuss related human-system integration issues, and more specifically tangibility and emerging collaboration factors elicited from formative evaluation results.