Beyond record and play

Abstract

Digital Manipulatives embed computation in familiar children's toys and provide means for children to design behavior. Some systems use "record and play" as a form of programming by demonstration that is intuitive and easy to learn. With others, children write symbolic programs with a GUI and download them into a toy, an approach that is conceptually extensible, but is inconsistent with the physicality of educational manipulatives. The challenge we address is to create a tangible interface that can retain the immediacy and emotional engagement of "record and play" and incorporate a mechanism for real time and direct modulation of behavior during program execution.We introduce the Backpacks, modular physical components that children can incorporate into robotic creations to modulate frequency, amplitude, phase and orientation of motion recordings. Using Backpacks, children can investigate basic kinematic principles that underly why their specific creations exhibit the specific behaviors they observe. We demonstrate that Backpacks make tangible some of the benefits of symbolic abstraction, and introduce sensors, feedback and behavior modulation to the record and play paradigm. Through our review of user studies with children ages 6-15, we argue that Backpacks extend the conceptual limits of record and play with an interface that is consistent with both the physicality of educational manipulatives and the local-global systems dynamics that are characteristic of complex robots.