Productive Encounters Children, Learning Spaces, and Piezoelectrics

There is a strong relation between playful learning and the environment children inhabit. An environment can easily turn into a medium for play while its patterns and children's interactions with these patterns can turn into experiences of learning. Developed upon findings from an analog pilot study and built with an open source electronic platform and piezoelectric sensors, our prototype translates children's physical actions into responses of an interactive device. Experiments with children using the prototype support, in part, a unifying approach to designing playful learning environments embedded with tangible spatial interaction.