Quantifying children's engagement with educational tangible blocks

Abstract

Playful learning is a powerful method to enhance children's engagement with teaching material, often resulting in better learning. Several prior works demonstrated the existence of a relation between tangibles and engagement, but they did not characterize it with specific measures. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the degree of engagement with tangible blocks by quantifying children's proactive and passive actions during a learning session. Based on a user study with 36 kindergarten children, our findings show that tangibles support a higher degree of engagement, fosters attention and collaboration, and possibly lead to more active learning.