A Framework for Developing Tangible Educational Applications

This paper presents a new version of a framework designed and developed for the creation of context-sensitive applications. This framework allows the authoring, by users without programming skills, of smart environments, which produce the appropriate feedback to the users based on the data gathered by different sensors spread throughout the environment to capture contextual information. Using this framework, we created the Ecosystem Room, a tangible system that aims to raise children awareness to environmental problems and encourage behaviour changes that contribute to improve the environment. This allowed us to test the usefulness of the framework in creating tangible educational application for children. A description of the Ecosystem Room application, as well as the results of the performed user studies, is also presented in this paper.