Smart material interfaces for education☆
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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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Henry Duh.