Quilt Snaps: a fabric based computational construction kit

In this paper we present Quilt Snaps, a fabric based construction kit consisting of a set of computationally enhanced quilting pieces. Our discussion focuses on three ways that children can engage with Quilt Snaps. First, Quilt Snaps allows children to act as the engineers, designers, and decorators of their own digital manipulatives. Second, by playing with the manipulatives that they´ve helped to construct, children can learn about concepts relevant to programming, graph theory, and dynamical systems. Finally, since Quilt Snaps is fabric based, children can use the pieces they construct as personal mobile display media.