AGORAS: Exploring Creative Learning on Tangible User Interfaces

Departing from creative learning foundations, this paper discusses on the suitability of interactive tables as a grounding technology to support creative learning for several reasons: support for social learning, because the subjects share a physical space as in traditional non-digital technologies, communication during the creative, experimental and reflexive process is direct and not computer-mediated, and subjects can carry out the task in parallel on the same surface. Considering reflection, discussion and creation processes in a loop, an experiment with teenagers has been conducted comparing a digital-based against a pure tangible tabletop in a task of creating entities consisting of blocks and joint elements. This preliminary study, designed to obtain initial insights about whether the grounding technology may become a promising tool to support creative learning, explores some aspects such as productivity, complexity of designs and concurrent co-manipulation. The results showed that subjects were more productive in terms of the number of solutions obtained using the non computer-mediated approach. However using the digital tabletop approach subjects design, on average, more complex or elaborate solutions in terms of the number of involved bodies and joints. Finally, an important finding was that teams established more frequently concurrent cooperation schemes in the digital tabletop condition by sharing more effectively the creation space.