Evolving tangibles for children's social learning through conversations: Beyond turntalk

Social learning curricula teach children social norms for managing conversations, such as the norm of not overlapping in talking turns. Interactive tangible objects (briefly, tangibles) can help teachers in the scaffolding of such norms. Such tangibles should be created for the specific social learning contexts of their users, and evolve according to their requirements. An ideal design process for tangibles for children's conversations is meta-design, based on action-research: evolving tangible prototypes are developed, with natural material and easy-to-use micro-electronics components; tangibles are adopted by their users in ecological studies, and their usage is reflected over with designers to stir design directions or uncover design possibilities, which are developed and again used by users. This paper reports on such an evolutionary design process, concerning tangibles for children's conversations. It shows how new design ideas emerged by making users adopt design solutions and moving designers into ecological settings.