Tangible Interaction for Children’s Creative Learning: A Review

Creativity is an important part of children's education. Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) provide new possibilities for creative learning. In this review, we gave an overview of recent studies that supported children's creative learning using TUIs. Results showed that TUIs had many advantages, such as they (1) were novice-friendly, (2) supported children's cognitive process and development, (3) promoted their initiatives, (4) enabled them to think outside the box, and (5) encouraged communication and collaboration in an authentic context. Meanwhile, we summarized previous work's three main limitations: First, most of the studies did not have a long-term experimental verification with sufficient sample size and objective evaluation; Second, some TUI designs lacked a balance of abstractness, openness, richness, and complexity; Finally, the use of TUIs had little consideration of the teacher's role. Therefore, further research should focus more on the trans-disciplinary nature of TUIs for creative learning and leverage collaboration between human-computer interaction researchers and school teachers.