Smart material interfaces for education

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2015.10.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Teaching children through smart materials, Scratch, Arduino and origami.

  • Smart origami models tell a story.

  • Engaging scientific education.

Abstract

This paper describes an experience, held with a class of primary school children, aimed to introduce a novel educational topic, the smart materials, and the interfaces built with them (Smart Material Interfaces). The pupils were guided along a multidisciplinary path in which traditional and innovative teaching methods were composed for educating while engaging the children. It led to the creation of 6 automated puppet plays focused on the themes of environmental awareness as a result. In this process, storytelling and visual programming acted as powerful means for merging different educational concepts and techniques. The data collected through the direct observation and the questionnaires indicate that the experience was perceived as positive and interesting. The post evaluation, held some months later, revealed skills and knowledge improvements in all the areas involved by the multidisciplinary experience.

Section snippets

Motivation

Educators should be able to offer up-to-date educational paths capable of integrating the novelties of science and technology with the engagement of the pupils for improved learning. Smart materials represent a novel and interesting technological topic to teach and learn. They can change their physical properties (e.g. colour, shape, and so forth) and they can be manipulated and controlled through different hardware platforms (e.g. Arduino) for the creation of interesting and engaging

Related works

Smart materials (SMs) are a category of materials that can change a physical property in a controlled way. They are already embedded in electronics and products of everyday use (e.g. darkening sunglasses, glasses that remember their shape after deformation). Recently have they started to be used also in the creation of do-it-yourself projects. SMs represent an interesting educational topic. Their use as components of interfaces made of physical objects can give a strong boost for attracting the

Teaching process

For this experience we used various materials, hardware and software. The smart materials used were of two kinds, the choice based on the most aesthetic and interesting properties: changing shape (Shape Memory Alloy, SMA) and colours (thermochromic paints). The thermochromic paint has a thermic threshold, once it is reached it becomes transparent. We applied resistive wire to the back of the paper to reach the needed temperature gradient, this allowed us to “switch the colour on or off”. Among

Results

We tracked the educational process using direct observation, videos, questionnaires and a set of individual and group tasks.

Conclusion

The final evaluation demonstrated that the design of the educational experience was successful in many aspects. The children acquired new knowledge in relation to new technological topics, such as the smart materials properties, and acquired new skills for programming interfaces based on them. We noticed improvements in all the areas involved by the multidisciplinary experience, from the increase of the environmental awareness to the skills for the text analysis. At the end of the educational

Note

This paper is a revised version of the paper A Smart Material Interfaces Learning Experience doi:10.18293/DMS2015-013

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Cited by (4)

This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Henry Duh.

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