SmartTiles: Designing Interactive “Room-Sized” Artifacts for Educational Computing

Historically, the notion of design for educational computing has assumed that the “computer” in question is a desktop box. In this paper we describe a genre of educational computing in which the artifacts designed are “room-sized:” moderate-to-large-scale objects or furnishings with which children can interact in powerful or interesting ways. We describe a working prototype of one such system—SmartTiles, a system of large-scale programmable “tiles” that can endow surfaces such as walls with interesting, childcontrolled dynamical behaviors. While SmartTiles is still at a relatively early stage of design—and has yet to be formally tested with children—it nonetheless illustrates a potentially important and novel genre of design for children’s environments. We contrast the notion of “room-sized educational artifacts” with related research directions in interface design and educational computing, and we discuss what we believe to be central issues in the design of such artifacts.