The Tangible Interactive Design and Learning Laboratory, a team of designers, artists and scientists at Northwestern, focuses on finding and exploring ways technology can be used in learning.
“The best way to describe it is imagining future possibilities of technology and learning and how we can use technology to support learning, but at the same time taking a really critical view of what technology is and how it gets used and what we can do with it,” said McCormick and SESP Prof. Michael Horn, the lab’s director.
Its main project currently is TunePad, a free online platform that allows users to create music by playing digital forms of various instruments or writing code in the Python programming language.
The lab routinely works with Evanston/Skokie School District 65 to test out the application. Between 40 to 50 undergraduate volunteers a year are sent in pairs to classrooms across the district to work with instructors while teaching students computer science.
Horn views computer programming and music as forms of literacy, saying that both can reinforce and interact with the other. TunePad is a combination of the two languages.
“We’re really trying to encourage kids to tell stories through music and especially stories that are meaningful and personally relevant to get them to think about social issues that are important to them … It’s been exciting to see how much a fifth grader can do,” Horn said.
Another focus of TunePad is creating physical instruments that can be connected to the software and function as an interface for digital instruments.
Maddie Brucker, a fifth-year McCormick and SESP graduate student, is working on making bucket drums that connect to the software.
She wants her project to allow students to engage with TunePad in a more interactive way, since coding is usually a “solo endeavor,” she said.
“Some of the desire came from this feeling of how do we give young people an opportunity to move their bodies and to kind of work together,” Brucker said.
Brucker described the lab itself as a “great environment socially and interpersonally.”
TIDAL is also working on a project creating “math playthings for hands-on learning.” Third-year SESP student Khushbu Kshirsagar created modular blocks to “enable math play.”
To see how and why people play with them, Kshirsagar said she left them out in a coffee shop, in museums and at an Evanston Township High School block party to see if they would be used by kids or adults.
“I am currently thinking about how we design for curiosity and more so in the form of objects,” Kshirsagar said. “Everyone’s curious about different things, but how do we design certain objects that speak to the user in a way that they serve as invitational entry points for curiosity? And what might those design features be?”
The lab has also made interactive exhibits for museums, such as “Mission: Code” at the Science City at Union Station in Kansas City, where people can program a Mars rover.
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