Designing Manipulative Technologies for Children with Different Abilities

Henrik Hautop Lund*, Patrizia Marti°

*Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute for Production Technology

University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M., Denmark ° Multimedia Communication Laboratory

University of Siena, Via dei Termini 6, 53100 Siena, Italy

hhl@mip.sdu.dk marti@unisi.it www.adaptronics.dk

Abstract This paper presents a design approach for manipulative technologies that considers the “user diversity” as a main lever for design. Different dimensions of “diversity” are considered: users’ age, abilities, culture, cultural background, and alphabetisation. These dimensions drives the development of a user-centred design process for manipulative technologies for learning and play environments. Especially, we explore the possibility of allowing young children to develop and interact with virtual/physical worlds by manipulating physical objects in different contexts, like the classroom, the hospital, the playground. In our scenarios, we consider children with different abilities (fully able, physically impaired, with cognitive delays) in different cultures (Denmark, Tanzania, Italy) and with a different level of alphabetisation. The needs and expectations of such heterogeneous user group are taken into account through a user-centred design process to define a concept of tangible media for collaborative and distributed edutainment environments. The concept is implemented as a set of building blocks called I-BLOCKS with individual processing and communication power. Using the I-BLOCKS system, children can do ‘programming by building’ and thereby construct interacting artefacts in an intuitive manner without the need to learn and use traditional programming languages. In the paper, we describe in detail the technology of I-BLOCKS and discuss lessons learned from “designing for diversity”.

Introduction Dourish1 defines embodiment as “the creation, manipulation, and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artefacts”. By artefacts he does not only mean physical objects, but also social practice. Rather than embedding fixed notions of meaning within technologies, embodied interaction is based on the understanding that users create and communicate meaning through their interaction with the system and with each other through the system. The concept of embodiment allows Dourish to combine two trends from the human-computer interaction area; tangible interaction where interaction is distributed over the abstract digital world and objects in the physical world2, and social computing where social practice and the construction of meaning through social interaction is core in design3. The concept of manipulative technology presented in this paper entails both looking for the physical artefact embodiment in learning and play environments, as well as allowing for social practice and meaning construction across user diversity. In particular, we describe a design approach for the development of manipulative technologies for users with different abilities. At the core of this design principle is the observation that in order to design technologies suitable for a variety of users, it is important to include user diversity in the design process. The dimensions of diversity are determined based on the ability differences of the target end user groups, and can, for instance, be in terms of the users’ age, abilities, culture, cultural background, and alphabetisation. As an example take the process of designing a novel interactive artefact for the World market. In this case, in order to ensure suitable use for the target end user group, i.e. users from different cultures and with different cultural backgrounds, it will be necessary to develop the novel artefact through a design process that sheds light on the possible use and interaction patterns in different cultures. It is our belief that such an understanding of cultural dependent use and interaction patterns are best understood by

involving users of different cultures and cultural backgrounds in the design process. Another example could be the design of tools for users with different cognitive abilities. In this case, it is important that the tools are appropriate for the users with the different cognitive abilities at different levels, and the best way to achieve such appropriateness could well be to include users with different cognitive abilities in the design process, as suggested here with novel design principle. In all cases, it is believed that the involvement of different users with different abilities will allow more general solutions to emerge from the design process. But even for personalised or culturalised artefacts, it is our belief that the design process will demand involvement of different abilities/cultures in order to understand how to design the most appropriate personalisation or culturalisation, e.g. through the development of appropriate adaptive technologies that facilitate the personalisation or culturalisation. The Design Approach The design approach we adopted to develop the I-BLOCK technology builds on a variety of human and social science traditions that focus on understanding human activity, all of which seek to provide useful and pertinent observations on human action in different contexts. Such observations drive a “human-centred” and culturally based perspective on the design of novel interactive artefacts and environments. The general idea of our design approach is to have a continuous interplay among all the main activities (activity analysis and observation, concept design, prototyping, development and evaluation) through a series of consecutive cycles of development where ideas are tried out and lessons learned are propagated back. Design cycles are not only intended to refine initial ideas but also to enlarge the potential of the technological solution by bringing in the design different user perspectives and cultural values. As the uncertainty is highest in the beginning of the process, the cycles are initially quite short (concentrating on development and evaluation of mock-ups, exploratory prototypes and proofs-of-concept prototypes) but will later on become longer (allowing for the development of more in-depth or experimental prototypes). Furthermore, in order to “interface” between the cycles, a set of usage scenarios are combined with prototypes of diverse fidelity supporting simulations of realistic contexts of use. The key idea is that these prototypes at any time throughout the process specify the currently best versions of the design concept and user requirements for the construction of scenarios illustrating their use. The process develops in the following steps:

- intense activity analysis and observation feeds a high level concept generation process where the main qualities of the project are defined.

- software and hardware components are then selected from state-of-the-art to be used for building the first prototypes.

- scenarios describing the use of system are defined together with mock-up supporting simulation sessions.

- as the project progresses, new elements are added continuously: more robust prototypes, new scenarios based on work in real life settings at the sites, continuous evaluation with different users in different cultural and functional contexts.

In what follows, we describe the application of this design approach to develop the I-BLOCK technology. As anticipated in the introduction, this technology implement a concept of tangible media, a set of building blocks used to support learning, rehabilitation and leisure activities of children with different abilities and cultural background. Analysis and Field Observation A first definition of the I-BLOCK technology has been tried out in the context of the speech therapy for children. Speech therapy is the corrective or rehabilitative treatment of physical and/or cognitive deficits/disorders resulting in difficulty with verbal communication. This includes both speech (articulation, intonation, rate, intensity) and language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, both receptive and expressive language, including reading and writing). Depending on the nature and severity of the disorder, common treatments may range from physical strengthening exercises, instructive or repetitive practice and drilling, to the use of audio-visual aids. Speech and language therapists or pathologists provide a wide range of services for all ages, in early intervention (ages 0-3 years old), preschool, primary and secondary schooling, home care, and hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. Speech problems such as the inability to formulate coherent sentences or to understand verbal statements are collectively known as aphasia. There are multiple types of aphasia: including problems with reading, writing, speaking

or understanding speech. But there is no standard protocol to determine which type of treatment is best for which type of patient. Speech therapists generally rely on their own experience and intuition to determine a patient's treatment regimen. One of the most used techniques for speech therapy employs card games. As an example, a person may be asked to analyse the letters represented on the cards and compose words, fill in a blank, read and repeat. Observing the practice of this kind of therapy we thought to use the I-BLOCKS in speech therapy, in order to give more feedback and more sensorial information to the child. Our hypothesis was to test whether external representations, in the form of dynamic I-BLOCK constructions, would assist children in learning linguistic structures in a more effective way than with the combination of static iconic pictures like the ones currently used by speech therapists. Besides this, we want to test if bricks, differently from cards, can support the children in the performance of logic and grammatical abstraction tasks. A third hypothesis is that bricks can support the creative activity of linguistic production once the structuring of sentence is well interiorised by children through the feedback provided by the I-BLOCKS. From an intense period of observation of speech theraphy sessions, we realised that the speech therapist tries to teach to children with language problem the right structure of a sentence. In focus group sessions, the speech therapist’s work with children was observed, and it is evident that manipulation of objects is a very important feature in order to reach language skills. Every task has the form of a game, in which the speech therapist helps the child, giving good scaffolding to the task. Children with dyslexia, i.e. a difficulty in the scholastic learning, or with a Specific Language Impairment (SLI), can have problems to understand the structure of a sentence, and the speech therapist tries to help using lots of instruments. One of a task that the speech therapist purveys is to construct a sentence with special cards. These cards have different shapes: (1) Small and tall green rectangle for article (Fig. 1), (2) Rectangle with an icon on for noun (Fig. 2), (3) Red arrow for verb (Fig. 1), and (4) Small square for preposition. Fig. 1: Example of an article and a verb card.

Fig. 2: Example of a situation-card. The activity is articulated in the following steps:

- The child has to recognize the different parts of a sentence without icons (verb and article). - The therapist encourages the child to choose a situation depicted on the situation cards. - The therapist presents the components of the specific sentence that the child has to identify and to

use to structure the sentence (e.g. “the child eats the chicken”). - The child composes the sentence putting the constituting elements in sequence. - the therapist asks the child to read the sentence putting his/her finger on the cards. If the

performance is not correct, the therapist encourages the child to try again making questions like -Where is the word “the” in the following sequence? (Fig. 3).

Another version of the task is to make available more noun-icons and to ask to the child to construct a good sentence (semantic task).

Fig. 3: An example of sentence where an article is missing (‘The boy eats chicken’). Mock-up and Wizard of Oz A first design cycle of the I-BLOCK was to develop speech therapy scenarios and try the building block concept with a mock-up in a Wizard of Oz session. In the traditional therapy, the child manipulates the cards, and every card represents a well specified part of the sentence. The feedback to correct or wrong actions comes from the speech therapist. With the I-BLOCKS, we aimed to develop a system where the child is manipulating the structure of sentences when manipulating with the physical structure of I-BLOCKS, and at the same time receives feedback from the I-BLOCKS construction. In the first mock-ups implementation, we have decided to preserve the characteristic of the article (the small dimension), and to give different colours for different roles in the sentence: (1) Red small brick for article, (2) Green brick for noun, (3) Yellow display brick for verb. So a sentence construction could take the form shown in figure 5. The I-BLOCKS can now give feedback and sensorial information to the child based upon the physical structure that the child has created. The first testing activity was performed with two children, T. 6 years old, with hypoacusia and M. 10 years old, with dyslexia. In order to experiment the idea at a low cost, the Wizard of Oz technique was used. This technique involves a user interacting with a fake system (low fi prototypes) which is actually operated by a hidden developer - referred to as the 'wizard'4. The wizard processes input from a user and simulates system output. During this process the user is led to believe that they are interacting directly with the system. This form of prototyping is beneficial early on in the design cycle and provides a means of studying a user's expectations and requirements. The approach is particularly suited to exploring design possibilities in systems which are demanding to implement such as those that feature intelligent interfaces incorporating agents, advisors and/or natural language processing. In our case, we re-created a situation in which the child had the idea of interacting with a fully working I-BLOCK system that provided timely and appropriate feedback. For the testing different verb, article and noun bricks were developed for composing Subject – Verb – Object sentences. The situation cards represented the following situations:

- the child drinks the juice - the child eats the chicken - the child greets a friend - the iceman sells the ice-ream - the child buys the ice-cream - the newsagent sells the newspapers - the child looks at the television (in italian the sentence is without preposition! Il bambino guarda

la televisione) - the doctor examines the child - the mum kisses the child - the teacher reads a novel - the mechanic repairs the car - the grandma sews the dress - the grandpa buys the bread - the daddy drives the car - the mum irons the trousers

In addition to noun, verb and article bricks, another special silver brick was used to verify the correct composition of the sentence. The silver brick produced a sound in case the sentence was incorrect, or it read the sentence without inflections in case the task was performed correctly. The testing activity was similar to the one executed through the cards. The child composed the sentence using the bricks (Fig. 4) and then the therapist asked the child to read the sentence and check the correctness with the silver brick (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4: “the mum irons the trousers” In case of error, the child was encouraged to try other combinations until the correct one is reached. Therefore “system” pronounced the correct sentence so the child could compare is performance with the one of the system.

Fig. 5: a sentence with the silver brick The Wizard of Oz worked well, so the mock-up was implemented for further testing. The experience revealed a number of interesting properties of the bricks:

- The interactive bricks sustained trial-and-error activity. The children were stimulated to seek different configurations of bricks and rapidly check the results.

- Children were in control of the experimental setting. They could check themselves the results of the activity without the support of the therapist.

- Children were much more involved in the activity. The same task performed with cards resulted boring and in some cases frustrating.

- The silver brick was always put at the end of the sentence to mean that the children understood the sequential structure of the sentence.

- The sound feedback is informative and not intrusive. It was interesting to note how the children were encouraged to reflect on the structure of the sentence in case of error.

- The abstraction task was executed correctly. The children became familiar with the bricks and were able to recognise the grammatical elements of the sentence (noun brick, article brick etc.).

In a later testing session the children were asked to invent a sentence using the bricks, without icons. The result was amazing. M. for example composed the following sentences that reflected his interest for animals: The varan lives in Komodo The varan eats goats in Komodo where he used yellow bricks to represent the preposition (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6: creation of new sentences

Prototype: I-BLOCKS After involving children with dyslexia in the Wizard of Oz for defining the basis for the novel manipulative technology, we turned to involvement of children with other cognitive abilities in the second phase of the design process. We developed and used supporting devices for exploring the proposed design of flexible and physical components to manipulate conceptual structures. We call these devices I-BLOCKS (Intelligent Blocks). The I-BLOCKS tool consists of a number of ‘intelligent’ building blocks that can be manipulated to create both physical functional and conceptual structures 5, 6. The I-BLOCKS support our more philosophical claim that both body (physical structure) and brain (functional structure) play a crucial role in intelligence. The focus on building both physical and functional structures with the I-BLOCKS also lead to the possibility of investigating the concept of ‘programming by building’ [2], in which programming of a specific behaviour simply consists of building physical structures known to express that specific behaviour. So, we suggest moving away from programming the artefacts with traditional programming languages, and instead provide methods that allow people to ‘program by building’ without the need for any a priori knowledge about programming languages. Indeed, we even suggest to completely removing the traditional host computer (e.g. a PC) from the creative process. The I-BLOCKS tool for manipulating conceptual structures consists of a number of ‘intelligent’ building blocks (I-BLOCKS) that each contains processing and communication capabilities. Each I-BLOCK has a physical expression (e.g. a cube or a sphere). When attaching more I-BLOCKS together, a user may create a physical structure of I-BLOCKS that process and communicate with each other, depending on how the I-BLOCKS are physically connected to each other. Interaction with the surrounding environment happens through I-BLOCKS that obtain sensory input or produces actuation output. So the overall behaviour of an ‘intelligent artefact’ created by the users with the I-BLOCKS depends on the physical shape of the creation, the processing in the I-BLOCKS, and the interaction between the creation and the surrounding environment (e.g. the users themselves) – see 5 for details.

Fig. 7. Left: the internals of a building block with micro processor and communication channels. Right: example of input (sensor) building block that contains two microphones. © H. H. Lund, 2002.

In this our first implementation, the I-BLOCKS uses an electronic circuit containing a PIC16F876 40-pin 8 bit CMOS Flash microcontroller for processing, and provides four 2-ways serial connections in each I-BLOCK for communication (see Fig. 7). In order to better visualise the concept, we have chosen to make the housing out of rectangular LEGO DUPLO1 bricks. Energy power from a battery building block is transported through the construction of I-BLOCKS via connectors in the corners on the bottom on each block and connectors in the studs on top of each block.

1 LEGO and LEGO DUPLO are trademarks of LEGO System A/S.

There exist different types of I-BLOCKS that all share the same standard technology of providing processing and communication capabilities. We term these standard building blocks. In a number of cases, the standard building blocks are extended with the addition of sensors in order to become input building blocks, and in a number of cases extended with the addition of actuation in order to become output building blocks. Input building blocks include building blocks with LDR sensors, IR sensors, microphones, switches, potentiometer, and output building blocks include building blocks with servo motor, DC motor, IR emitter, LEDs, sound generator, etc. (see examples on Fig. 7). In order to verify the technological possibilities of the I-BLOCKS (e.g. versatility of control methods), we implemented different kinds of processing in the I-BLOCKS, making the I-BLOCKS becoming arithmetic blocks, behaviour blocks, neural blocks, and spiking neural blocks 7. For the language grammar training scenario developed through the Wizard of Oz experiments, we utilised the I-BLOCKS types presented in table 1. Table 1. I-BLOCKS to construct and grammar check sentences.

We implemented a system in the I-BLOCKS reflecting the properties of the Wizard of Oz experiments utilising the I-BLOCKS presented in Table 1. At the end of our second phase in the design process, the manipulative technology would consist of I-BLOCKS implemented in LEGO DUPLO bricks would represent nouns, verbs, articles, preposition, based on their colour or size. Each block would also be labelled with the word. Further, a large I-BLOCK (in fact two blocks put together) would represent the magic silver brick. This large block (combining display brick and sound brick) would write the sentence on a display and play a happy or sad tune, depending on the correctness of the constructed sentence.

Formative Evaluation and Redesign For our second phase in the design process of the manipulative technology, we involved users with no learning difficulties contrary to the first phase in the design process that involved children with dyslexia. The users of the second phase were school pupils at the primary school Aalokke Skolen in Odense,

Battery block for power supply

Small CPU blocks. Labelled to be a noun, verb, article, preposition. Can depend on colour of the block.

CPU-block. Labelled to be a noun, verd, article, preposition, verb. Can depend on colour of the block.

Display block. Does the grammatical check, and displays the sentence. The user can scroll through the sentence using the buttons on the block.

Sound block. Can play a happy or a sad tune. It is put on top of the Display block that does the grammatical check.

Denmark. Interactive sessions took place over two weeks during August/September 2003, with two sessions a week, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. The children participating in the sessions were from a 4th grade class, and they were divided into 3 groups with 4 children in each group. The design process in this second phase was again iterative, with feedback from pupils and teachers being used to develop and modify the manipulative technology between the sessions. For this formative evaluation, we used observations (e.g. video recordings) and questionnaires for pupils and teacher. During the first session, the children were introduced to the I-BLOCKS and were allowed to play and experiment with the I-BLOCKS without any pre-defined task provided by the instructor. This was intended to give the children hands-on experience with the proposed manipulative technology. During this session, it was experienced that there were power connection problems and some malfunctions of some of the I-BLOCKS, which led the children to become impatient with playing with the tool. Part of our interpretation of the interaction problems was that the children became impatient when no feedback is given upon failure. Based on the evaluation of the first session, the system was modified to include a timer that would allow the system to display an error signal upon time-out (a predefined time limit), and thereby signal to the user that some problem occurred and a retry/reconstruction should be made. This was aimed at partially alleviate the impatience problem observed during the first session. The goal of the second session was to evaluate the modified prototype system, and to have the pupils to solve simple grammar tasks with the I-BLOCKS. They should 1) use the I-BLOCKS to build sentences with nouns in determinate form, and draw the sentence structures on paper, and 2) use the I-BLOCKS to build sentences with nouns in indeterminate form, and draw the sentence structures on paper.

Fig. 8: Four steps of the work during the second session. Top left: A sentence in Danish made with the I-BLOCKS during the second session. Top right: A pupil drawing the sentence structure from the left picture. Bottom left: Colouring the drawing of the sentence. Bottom right: writing the sentence on paper.

Figure 8 and 9 show some examples of different I-BLOCKS structures made to construct sentences. In general, the pupils were very interested in solving the tasks, which was maybe somewhat surprising based upon the problems experienced during the first session. The pupils understood immediately the changes to the I-BLOCKS with error feedback, and seemed to appreciate this by becoming much more engaged in the work with the I-BLOCKS.

Fig. 9: A sentence built with a different I-BLOCKS structure made by one group of children. The sentence is read from bottom to top, left to right. The evaluation of the second session told us that the improvements were helpful, but also that connection problems between the I-BLOCKS posed a very serious problem. Often, when two blocks were put together, there would still not be connection on the communication channels, and this, obviously, led to serious problems. Also, it seemed important to provide an immediate feedback that could be perceived by the whole group of pupils, and not only provide the text on the small display. For the third session, the pupils should again construct sentences with the I-BLOCKS. This time, the I-BLOCKS system was modified to include a speaker block to provide auditory feedback on the grammatical correctness of the sentence constructed with I-BLOCKS. Also, the system was extended to allow for adjectives and for constructing questions. The pupils started building right away after a small presentation of the new types of blocks, and the pupils were very engaged in solving the task in this third session, even though they had still been somewhat impatient towards the end of the second session. Especially the speaker block gained a lot of attention, and the pupils were really pleased with the sound feedback. Indeed, we observed that the sound feedback encouraged the students to continue building even though they from time to time got negative sound feedback. The pupils also liked the ability of using adjectives, maybe because they found it more challenging when they were able to build more complex sentences. The pupils didn’t find it difficult to build questions or sentences containing adjectives. Figure 10 shows a structure representing a more complex sentence, according to the extended grammar. During this session, the power connections did not cause any troubles. There is no exact explanation why the I-BLOCKS worked that well for this session and not the two previous sessions. A reason could be that pupils had become more experienced with the I-BLOCKS, due to the fact that they were more capable of operating the I-BLOCKS. Fig. 10 is a close-up of a structure containing the new I-BLOCK types, on top of the Display block is the speaker and beneath the adjective block, and the pupil is scrolling through the sentence represented by the structure.

Fig. 10: Left: A structure supporting the extended grammar. Right: A closeup of an extended structure. The goal of the fourth session was to collect feedback from the pupils and the teacher, and questionnaires were handed out, filled in, and collected. The questions posed to the pupils were as follows

1. Has it been difficult to use the blocks? 2. Have the blocks made it easier or more difficult to understand Danish? 3. What do you think about the blocks shape/connections? Is it too difficult to put them together? 4. Has it been difficult to work with the other pupils to solve the problems with the blocks? 5. What do you think about the way sentences are build with the blocks? 6. Has it been fun working with the blocks? 7. Would you like I-BLOCKS to be used in the education? 8. Do you have any suggestions how to make the blocks better? 9. Write three good things about I-BLOCKS 10. Write three bad things about I-BLOCKS 11. Do you have any suggestions for other problems that can be solved with I-BLOCKS

The answers to the first 7 questions to the pupils are quantified as shown in Fig. 11.

Fig. 11: Quantified result of the pupils answers to the questionnaire. Question numbers on the x-axis, and number of answers on the y-axis. In general, the pupils found it easy and fun to work with the I-BLOCKS, and more than 50% found that it made it easier for them to understand grammar. This is an important feedback from the users, showing that they find the new technology useful for learning the specific cognitive task. Also, the questionnaire revealed the power and communication problems were severe, e.g. used as argument by two pupils for

answering yes to question 1, by some pupils as argument for I-BLOCKS not being applicable in education, and as bad things about the I-BLOCKS. Further, the qualitative questions showed that most students found it fun to work with the I-BLOCKS, and for instance one of the pupils suggested that I-BLOCKS could be used for math training (as we would indeed do later during the third phase in the design process with Tanzanian children). The teacher answered (on a different questionnaire) that it was easy for the pupils to understand the I-BLOCKS concept and work with it, and that it helped the pupils in understanding grammar. Also, he commented that it is easy to experiment with sentence structures, and that it is more fun to work with than the ordinary textbook. On the other hand, he also expressed that in general, the I-BLOCKS system is probably too expensive for common use in elementary school (even though never were any cost estimates discussed with the teacher).

Summative Evaluation Based upon the feedback gained for the first and second phase of the design process, we engaged in a third phase involving users from a different culture with a different logic thinking and different background in technology confidence. In this case, we collaborated with users from a rural area in Tanzania. Tanzania is an Eastern African country, which has been independent since 1960s. Although Tanzania is economically one of the weakest countries in the World, the demand and the will for development is wide. There are only 3,3 computers per 1000 people in Tanzania (2001), and demand for education and skilled teachers is large. There are about 130 different tribes and many tribal languages 8, 9. The official languages are Swahili and English, which is the only teaching language in secondary school. Therefore, many pupils may find the gap between primary school and secondary school big, since they have to change from their childhood language to English. In order to facilitate the transfer from primary to secondary school, i.e. from Swahili to English, we introduced the new manipulative technology developed during the first and second phase of the design process in a secondary school in a rural area inlands in Southern Tanzania, at Pommern Secondary School about 1-2 hours drive from Iringa (see Fig. 12). Interestingly, after a very short hands-on free play period with the I-BLOCKS, the children had no problems in understanding the concept of the manipulative technology apart from the same power and communication problems as observed in the Danish school. Also, when introducing the I-BLOCKS to undergraduate training at university level at Tumaini University, Iringa, we experienced a surprising confidence and creativity with the technology after only few sessions of hands-on experiments. The easy access to the new manipulative technology prototype prompted us to also investigate the use of the I-BLOCKS for simple therapeutic use amongst hospitalised children at the Ilembula Hospital in a rural area of Tanzania (see Fig. 12). Also here, the first experiences suggested that the manipulative technology tool could be beneficial despite the slight problems of the initial prototype. Indeed, together with the undergraduate students at Tumaini University, we explored the use of I-BLOCKS in the Tanzanian cultural context during a full semester course in autumn 2004, and in individual project course activities in spring 2005. The outcome was numerous development directions for making the manipulative technology appropriate for the particular cultural context (see Fig. 12).

Fig. 12: Left: Users from Pommern Secondary School, Tanzania. Right: User from Ilembula Hospital, Tanzania. Bottom: Developing African I-BLOCKS concept maps together with undergraduate students at Tumaini University, Tanzania. Based upon the feedback from the first, second, and third design phase, it was evident that most user groups provided feedback related the following problems to be solved: 1) better possibilities for constructing in 3 dimensions, 2) better and more reliable power connections, and 3) better and more reliable communication between the blocks. Therefore, in this third phase of the design process, we engaged in the technological development of a new I-BLOCKS prototype that would solve these problems. In order to accommodate “real” 3D structures we decided to make a cubic shape of the new I-BLOCKS. This shape is more modular, and gives us the possibility of connecting up to 6 other I-BLOCKS to one I-BLOCK. However, when constructing this way, we have to take gravity into account, and we may experience problems such as bend-down and self-disassembly when building perpendicular to the gravity vector without supporting the structure. In the final design, we decided to have two sides open for sensors/actuators, two sides for male connectors, and two sides for female connectors. When designing connectors, there are a lot of things to take into account – both physical aspects and electrical aspects. Regarding the electrical aspects of the connectors, it must be ensured that the following features are included in each connector side of the cube:

- Power transfer. Power should be able to be supplied from one I-BLOCK to another, so that it is possible to have only few special power blocks in the structure.

- Communication connectors. Each side should include one or two connectors for half or full duplex serial communication.

- Rotational information. In some way information must be present to determine all 4 possible connection angles when connecting the I-BLOCKS.

Based upon these requirements that should allow us to solve the 3 problems from the first design phases, we constructed numerous, possible solutions, but finally produced the following cubic I-BLOCKS designed by J. Nielsen, shown in Fig. 13.

Fig. 13: Left: PCB with components for the cubic I-BLOCKS. The main processor is an ATmega128, and it contains four communication ports. Right: The cubic I-BLOCKS in a 3D construction.

Each cubic I-BLOCK uses an ATmega128 micro controller, and TL16C754BPN for 4 serial communication ports, allowing for two male connectors and two female connectors on each block. It is very easy to attach sensors and actuators to this hardware design. Also, in each of the four corners on each side of the cube we place small magnets to ensure that two cubes lock easily together in 90 degrees rotation intervals. With this design, we obtain very robust and reliable communication and power transfer, as well as simple 3D building possibilities. The final prototype (see Table 2) was tested at Ilembula Hospital in Tanzania with hospitalised children (e.g. children with leg fractures who are normally bedridden for 6-8 weeks) in June 2005 (see Fig. 14), and was evaluated by the Tanzanian instructors and nurses to be very effective. Indeed, parents and nurses commented that the I-BLOCKS had therapeutic benefits, such as that it allowed their children become cheerful and make faster recovery. For instance, one nurse expressed about one child’s use of the cubic I-BLOCKS: “She concentrates on this play. If she has other feelings such as a bad feeling, she may forget this”, and another nurse that “it gives happiness for the children – in what they have seen and done. Even if they are at home, they will tell the others that at the hospital we did this and this. So the information goes through to others at home.” Table 2. The different types of novel I-BLOCKS developed and used together with the African community.

Battery block for power supply. Inside is placed a 9V battery, and outside it has an on/off switch.

Flex sensor blocks. Measures how much the bar is being bent (e.g. by the user).

Force sensor block. Measures with how much force the sensor on one side of the block is being pressed.

LDR sensor block. Measures light intensity from the surrounding.

Colour LED block. Displays one of six different colours.

Sound block. Can play a sound or a tune.

In general, the whole I-BLOCKS project was highly recommended by the Tanzanian instructors and the concerned community, especially the children wards of the Ilembula hospital. Quoting one mother “… Mkiendelea kuwepo hapa watoto watapona haraka, kwa sababu wanapata cha kufanya, wanashinda wanacheza na vitu hivi vinavyowavutia…” meaning; “…Your presence speeds recovery of our children because they have something interesting to do rather than staying in bed…” Compared with the experiments with the technological prototype in the second phase of the design process, the new cubic I-BLOCK system allowed for a much easier use by the end users, in this case hospitalised children and children at an orphanage in a rural area of Tanzania. There were no power and communication problems, and it was easy to build 3D structures. This meant that the hospitalised children could use the new manipulative technology immediately without need for instruction or training.

Fig. 14: Top: Boys at the children ward of Ilembula Hospital playing with the novel I-BLOCKS. Bottom: Girls at the orphanage of Ilembula Hospital building and interacting with the novel I-BLOCKS. Discussion and Conclusion In the design process, we involved children with different abilities. During the first phase, we involved Italian children with learning difficulties, and utilised feedback from these children and their therapist to develop a scenario that emphasised the importance on immediate feedback from physical construction in order to facilitate the solving and learning of complex cognitive tasks. This was used as basis for developing the manipulative technology tested and developed together with pupils from a primary school in Denmark during the second phase. Afterwards, the manipulative technology was used and developed further in a different culture together with children with a different cultural background in Tanzania, and the final prototype was developed and tested with hospitalised children in a hospital in rural Tanzania. It should be noticed that the pupils in the Danish primary school found it most challenging and interesting to work with more complex physical structures and extended grammars (see Fig. 9 and Fig. 10). This was not the case with the Italian children with learning difficulties. In that case, it was evident that the most logical construction would be a one dimensional sequence on the table, probably because of the nature of

the language task, in which the sentence structure is inherently sequential. On the other hand, the I-BLOCKS technology allowed one dimensional construction as a tower and two dimensional constructions as shown in Fig. 15. This possibility was utilised extensively by the children at other cognitive levels. This may indicate that if we want to design such manipulative technology to be used by diverse user groups, it is important to include diverse users in the design process in order to understand the requirements and wishes of the different users.

Fig. 15: Possible construction with the I-BLOCKS mock-up for the linguistic task in three different languages (English, Italian, and Danish). Right: the same sentence in Italian with the I-BLOCKS.

On the other hand, for all user groups we found the immediate feedback (e.g. sound) and the physical manipulation to be extremely important, as learned from the first phase of the design process with the children with learning difficulties and their therapist. This was a very clear outcome of the involvement of therapists and children with learning difficulties. In this case, the involvement of this particular user group provided a clear focus on a therapeutic insight, which could be brought over to other user groups with a high advantage. This insight that children, teachers, therapists and nurses emphasised the importance on immediate feedback from physical construction in order to facilitate the solving and learning of complex cognitive tasks is paralleled with the Distributed Cognition approach 10. Following this approach, our hypothesis in designing I-BLOCKS, e.g. for the linguistic scenario, was that it may be possible to enhance cognition by mapping problem elements (components of a sentence) to an external, manipulative, physical and reacting construction in such a way that solutions become immediately evident and the children can receive feedback on their action of combining I-BLOCKS. Zhang and Norman11 propose a theoretical framework in which internal representations and external representations form a "distributed representational space" that represents the abstract structures and properties of the task in "abstract task space" (p. 90). They developed this framework to support rigorous and formal analysis of distributed cognitive tasks and to assist their investigations of "representational effects [in which] different isomorphic representations of a common formal structure can cause dramatically different cognitive behaviours" (p. 88). “External representation are defined as the knowledge of the structure in the environment, as physical symbols, objects, or dimensions (e.g., written symbols, beads of abacuses, dimensions of a graph, etc.), and as external rules, constraints, or relations embedded in physical configurations (e.g., spatial relations of written digits, visual and spatial layout of diagrams, physical constraints in abacuses, etc.)” (p. 180)12. This feature that different representations can cause dramatically different cognitive behaviour is referred to as “representational determinism”12, and we found this verified with the manipulative technology experiments presented here over the whole range of diversity in terms of users’ age, abilities, culture, cultural background, and alphabetisation. In our work presented here, we considered children with different abilities (fully able, physically impaired, with cognitive delays) in different cultures (Denmark, Tanzania, Italy) and with a different level of alphabetisation. The needs and expectations of such heterogeneous user group were taken into account through a user-centred design process to define a concept of tangible media for collaborative and distributed edutainment environments. When designing for diversity, we observed the importance of involving a heterogeneous user group in the design process. Heterogeneity gave rise to development and testing of different aspects of the developed artefact, such as feedback system, physical shape, physical size, building dimensions, connectivity, granularity, and processing, since the different user groups posed different requirements on the developed artefact in the design process. At the same time, the common aspects found over this heterogeneous user group, such as the importance of immediate feedback, physical

The/a child eats the/a chicken Il/un bambino mangia il/un pollo Et barn spiser en kylling

manipulation, and connectivity, make us confident in hypothesising the importance of those aspects, in general.

Acknowledgement

Part of the implementation work was performed by J. Nielsen, S. Jensen, M. Pedersen, C. Ryberg. A. Rullo, V. Palma, M. Vesisenaho, E. Sutinen, M. Duveskog, F. Ngumbuke, A. Msuta, A. Kibaja, C. Fumakule collaborated on the user research and testing with children. They all provided valuable discussions and contributed to the project. Thanks to the staff at Le Scotte hospital in Siena, Aalokke Skolen in Odense, Pommern Secondary School, Tumaini University, and Ilembula Hospital in Tanzania.

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