MONTESSORI IN THE MOBILE ERA: BUILDING NEW LEARNING EXPERIENCES THROUGH TANGIBLE USER INTERFACES

The growing prevalence of smartphones in the daily lives of many children has enabled new learning scenarios. An overwhelming supply of educational applications is designed to facilitate their autonomous learning in painting, counting, spelling and so on. Apparently, this approach is in line with the principles of Montessori education (independence, freedom and respect for the natural psychological development of the children). However, the well developed GUI interaction skills (tapping, swiping or pinching items through multi-touch gestures on a screen) of the 21st century children are useless for manipulating physical objects. Exploring the real world requires a different set of capabilities (e.g., fine prehensile skills), often developed through traditional toys and games. For this reason we have developed 3DU Blocks, a proposal that combines traditional toy blocks with the features provided by mobile devices to create new gaming experiences and open the door to explore new educational scenarios. 3DU Blocks is a library for color recognition in arrangements of traditional toy blocks, allowing to use them as a Tangible User Interface. As an early example of the capabilities of this library, we have developed 3DU Blocks Music, an educational game where players have to recreate simple melodies using toy blocks to represent musical instruments and notes. Therefore, the emphasis of Montessori in physical materials to help the autonomous learning process is combined with the immediate feedback and scaffolded challenges provided by the mobile application.