Designing manipulative technologies for children with different abilities

We present a design approach for manipulative technologies that consider “user diversity” as a main lever for design. Different dimensions of “diversity” are considered, e.g., the users' age, abilities, culture, cultural background, and alphabetization. These dimensions drive the development of a user-centered design process for manipulative technologies for learning and play environments. In particular, 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, or the playground. In our scenarios, we consider children with different abilities (fully able, physically impaired, or with cognitive delays), in different cultures (Denmark, Tanzania, and Italy), and with a different level of alphabetization. The needs and expectations of such heterogeneous user-groups are taken into account through a user-centered 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. Here, we describe in detail the technology of I-Blocks and discuss lessons learned from “designing for diversity.”