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Teaching with Tangibles: A Tool for Defining Dichotomous Sorting Activities

Learning activities with tangible user interfaces provide the benefits of active and peer mediated learning, while offering assistance from an autonomous guide on the side. Yet tangible user interfaces must typically be custom developed by computer scientists, and only rarely is the assistance of teachers sought. We present a new tool that gives teachers the power to create their own educational applications with tangible user interfaces. Using actual scientific specimens, the teachers can define object attributes for the students to sort on, and also develop curriculum-appropriate hints. We describe our computer vision-based approach, which enables recognition of tags representing dichotomous keys defined by a teacher. Teachers use our back-end system to define the dichotomous keys and other parameters for the learning activities, while our front-end system uses those parameters to guide the students.