İpek Kay, Hande Karakaş, Mine Özkar
In recent years, digital technologies have increasingly permeated children’s daily lives. This research explores a playscape with select digital technologies as means to meaningfully enhance children’s active and physical play. In our model, we aim to integrate the children’s experience of the physical space and the digital media and to develop an environment that supports both their bodily exploration in space and their use of a simple digital setup to create their own playscape. We propose a do-it-yourself (DIY) system in which children are bodily active and set the rules of the environment. The digital part of the proposed system consists of sensors to gather data from the physical environment, an operating system that transforms and records data and a projection that displays the output of the play. Its counterpart in the physical environment are basic geometric blocks that children can manipulate by using different body movements to create their own play patterns in an open ended space. This hybrid system enables synchronous changes in both environments in the form of physical movements with blocks in one and silhouettes of all these movements in the other. While the children construct their own playground in the physical environment, the digital playmate processes data of their bodily movements and adds to the environment.
***This paper was presented in the conference was in Thessaloniki, 2015.In the book EVERYWHERE AND ALL THE TIME AIN’T GOOD ENOUGH: What places for learners on the run? In (Germanos & Liapi, Eds) Places for learning experience: Think, Make, Change (2015).