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Playing with the sound maker: do embodied metaphors help children learn?

In this paper we present the results of a comparative study that explores the potential benefits of using embodied interaction to help children, aged 7 to 10, learn abstract concepts related to musical sounds. Forty children learned to create musical sound sequences using an interactive sound making environment. Half the children used a version of the system that instantiated a body-based metaphor in the mapping layer connecting body movements to output sounds. The remaining children used a version of the same environment that did not instantiate a metaphor in the mapping layer. In general, children were able to more accurately demonstrate sound sequences in the embodied metaphor based system version. However, we observed that children often resorted to spatial rather than body-based metaphors and that the mapping must be easily discoverable as well as metaphorical to provide benefit.