Unpacking the Potential of Tangible Technology in Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Hyo‐Jeong So, Ye-Eun Hwang, Yue Wang, Eunyul Lee · Educational Technology International · 2018
The main purposes of this study were (a) to analyze the research trend of educational use of tangible technology, (b) to identify tangible learning mechanisms, and potential benefits of learning with tangible technology, and (c) to provide references and future research directions. We conducted a systematic literature review to search for academic papers published in recent five years (from 2013 to 2017) in the major databases. Forty papers were coded and analyzed by the established coding framework in four dimensions: (a) basic publication information, (b) learning context, (c) learning mechanism, and (d) learning benefits. Overall, the results show that tangible technology has been used more for young learners in the kindergarten and primary school contexts mainly for science learning, to achieve both cognitive and affective learning outcomes, by coupling tangible objects with tabletops and desktop computers. From the synthesis of the review findings, this study suggests that the affordances of tangible technology useful for learning include embodied interaction, physical manipulations, and the physical-digital representational mapping. With such technical affordances, tangible technologies have the great potential in three particular areas in education: (a) learning spatial relationships, (b) making the invisible visible, and (c) reinforcing abstract concepts through the correspondence of representations. In conclusion, we suggest some areas for future research endeavors.