Let's get physical: The learning benefits of interacting in digitally augmented physical spaces

The advent of wireless and pervasive technologies offers many opportunities for designing learning experiences that encourage children to explore, initiate and reflect. Novel forms of interactions can be developed, that exploit the 'physical' and the 'digital' in a diversity of ways that move beyond the 'desktop' genre of interactions. In this paper, we describe an approach for developing digitally augmented physical spaces. Our claim is that getting children to interact with the physical world, resulting in relevant augmented digital information appearing and which can subsequently be interacted with, is what can facilitate active learning. We describe three case studies where we developed such novel learning experiences, and explain how we were able to promote active and playful learning. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.