Tangible Interfaces: Playful Learning

Tangible technologies differ in terms of the behaviour of control devices and resulting digital effects. A contrast is made between input devices where the form of user control is arbitrary and has no special behavioural meaning with respect to output (e.g. using a generic tool like a mouse to interact with the output on a screen), and input devices which have a close correspondence in behavioural meaning between input and output (e.g. using a stylus to draw a line directly on a tablet or touchscreen.

A wide range of challenging projects have attempted to use such ‘disappearing computers’ (or tangible interfaces) in education – from digitally augmented paper, toys that remember the ways in which a child moves them, to playmats that record and play back children’s stories.


There are design materials, fostering modeling of real-world structures, as well as physical objects, specifically designed for learning, which foster modeling of more abstract structures. Two prototypical members of this class are FlowBlocks and SystemBlocks, physical, modular interactive systems that serve as general-purpose modeling and simulation tools for dynamic behavior. They are accessible and engaging to young children, and encourage learning of abstract structures of dynamic behavior through a process of hands-on modeling, simulating, and analogizing.