A Smart Material Interfaces Learning Experience

This paper describes a learning experience held with a class of primary school children who were introduced to a novel class of resources, named smart materials, and the interfaces built with them (Smart Material Interfaces). The pupils were guided along a multidisciplinary educational path in which traditional and innovative teaching methods were composed for educating while engaging the children. It led to the creation of 6 automated puppet plays focused on the themes of environmental awareness as a result. In this process, storytelling and visual programming acted as powerful means for merging different educational concepts and techniques. The children’s engagement and the educational impact were evaluated during and after of the experience, revealing interesting results. The data collected through the direct observation and the questionnaires indicate that the experience was perceived as a positive and interesting. The post evaluation, held some months later, revealed improvements in all the areas involved by the multidisciplinary experience, from the knowledge of the properties of smart materials and the programming skills, to the increase of the environmental awareness and the skills for text analysis.