Abstract
Tangible User Interface (TUI) is an interface that allows user to interact with digital information through physical environment. We have developed an interactive system serves the educational field within the geographical domain. The system allows children to discover and learn about countries from different continents using tangible objects. In our project we selected so far six countries that represent six continents in the world. The selected countries are: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United States of America, France, Brazil, and Australia. With the system, children are required to manipulate tangible objects. Their task is to select a landmark from a country and placing it on the table top. The system will recognize the object and provides users with feedback. The system involves the recognition of six elements for each country: (capital, flag, climate, currency, population and industries). This application has been evaluated in a field study with children 9–11 years of age. The initial results are promising and show that such an interactive system can support interaction and collaboration among young children, as well as enriches the learning process and makes it more enjoyable.
Highlights
New interactive systems such as mobile device, tablet, games and simulations, Tangible User Interface (TUI) have spread dramatically in the educational field
We propose in this paper to increase another technology to this range of products: Discover Countries interactive system (Figure 1)
The proposed system are mainly based on reacTIVision platform which is a computer vision framework for the fast tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects [9]
Summary
New interactive systems such as mobile device, tablet, games and simulations, Tangible User Interface (TUI) have spread dramatically in the educational field. These systems allow interaction between user and digital information through physical objects. Using these systems for learning purpose can create an interactive environment that support edutainment for both students and teachers. We decided to use TUI concept that that allows users to interact with digital information through physical environment [8]. By placing an object on the table, basic information of the country will display on the computer screen with oral and visual feedback. Basic information include: climate, industries, population, flag, capital and currency)
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