Abstract
In recent years, tangible user interfaces (TUI) have gained in popularity in educational contexts, among others to implement problem-solving and discovery learning science activities. In the context of an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration, we conducted a multimodal EMCA-based video user study involving a TUI-mediated bicycle mechanics simulation. This article focusses on the discovering work of a group of three students with regard to a particular tangible object (a red button), designed to support participants engagement with the underlying physics aspects and its consequences with regard to their engagement with the targeted mechanics aspects.
Highlights
In the past decades computers in all its versions including mobile devices, smartboards, multi-touch boards and tangible system have become omnipresent in educational settings.Among them tangible interfaces (TUI) are gaining in popularity
We provided them with the necessary verbal instructions, which basically consisted in asking them to go inside the room, to read the task provided on the table and to solve it
We look at a single case of how three participants in a tangible user interfaces (TUI)-mediated JPS-activity make relevant their understandings of the functions of a salient widget to highlight how they accomplish the related interactional work of discovering and to explore how their insights are consequential on the organization of their discovery work with regard to the science curricular aspect
Summary
In the past decades computers in all its versions including mobile devices, smartboards, multi-touch boards and tangible system have become omnipresent in educational settings. Besides teaching us some lessons about designing TUI-mediated learning activities, the moment-by-moment EMCA-based multimodal analysis [6,7,8,9] of the data provided us with a valuable opportunity to study in detail participants’ joint discovery work [4,10,11] This in a twofold and intertwined way: Firstly, since we had left the participants in the dark about the features of the red button widget, they had to and did engage in a situated discovering process of jointly (re-)constructing its embedded functions. Discovery work in TUI-mediated problem-solving activities and some related design issues (Section 6)
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