Educational Robotics: Manipulative Technologies for Cognitive Rehabilitation

Abstract

The paper describes an early research related to the design, development and evaluation of a concept of flexible and physical components to manipulate conceptual structures. The concept exploits the affordances of physical objects in creating tangible media for collaborative and distributed edutainment spaces. Especially, we explore the possibility of allowing young children (and other potential users) to develop and interact with virtual/physical worlds by manipulating physical objects in different environments and at different scales (a classroom, a museum, a playground). A set of basic I-BLOCKS with individual processing and communication power was developed and can be further evolved in blocks of different shape and material in order to increase transparency of individual building block functionality. Users of the I-BLOCKS system can do ‘programming by building ’ and thereby construct functionality of artefacts in an intuitive manner without the need to learn and use traditional programming languages. In the paper we describe in detail the technology of I-BLOCKS and discuss their application to a linguistic scenario.