Embodied interaction in authoring environments
Pablo Romero, Judith Good, Benedict du Boulay, Judy Robertson, Henry Reid, Kate Howland · Figshare · 2007
How can we make it more appealing for young people to learn about and understand digital technology and computing concepts? We use both a different kind of interaction and a different kind of content to convey computing ideas such as subroutines, modules, abstraction, classes, objects and debugging. A crucial notion is embodied interaction, the idea that the child's interaction with the system should, in part, use her whole body, and not just fingers and eyes. In order to explore this approach we use the magic mirror, a device constructed from an interactive whiteboard and a camera such that when the child stands in front of it, the image she sees is her own but changed or augmented. For example it may show her in costume, or as a non-human creature. As she moves, so does her image. This device can be used as part of a lesson in which children create sequences of movements that can be recorded by the system and then manipulated in various ways to create more complex entities. The proposed work cuts across several disciplines, including education, psychology and computing, and will consider: in what ways can embodied authoring in principle (and in practice) be used to explore computing concepts, and, for each way, what advantages and disadvantages might it offer over traditional methods? In this paper we elaborate on the ways in which embodied authoring can support programming, explain the detail of the approach and report on some preliminary prototyping work we have undertaken.