Enhancing Bodily Engagements with Manipulatives for Tangible Programming

Abstract

Tangible User Interfaces are attributed to have a more ‘human-like’ interaction styles that resembles the experience of interacting with real world objects. Digital manipulatives are the TUIs in Tangible programming Environments. The tangibility of the manipulatives is what gives their characteristic appeal of making programming more interactive by engaging the fine motor skills. However, none of the existing tangible programming languages employ the gross motor skills that engages the entire body. This design project is a 10-week explorative study that seeks to envision a programming environment that is based on whole body movements. This generative and evaluative study is guided by the design philosophies of Movement Based interactions [7], Kinaesthetic Interactions [3] & Child Computer Interaction [4]. The design process is guided by the methodologies primarily influenced by the Design by movement approach [7]. Progressive cycles of conceptual design, supported by prototyping and testing resulted in adding richness to the interactions with the manipulatives of the tangible programming environment. The new interaction style involves the manipulatives to be moved using the entire body in order to build algorithmic structures.