Exploring Projection Based Mixed Reality with Tangibles for Nonsymbolic Preschool Math Education

A child's early math development can stem from interactions with the physical world. Accordingly, current tangible interaction studies focus on preschool children's formal (symbolic) mathematics, i.e. number knowledge. However, recent developmental studies stress the importance of nonsymbolic number representation in math learning, i.e. understanding quantity relations without counting(more/less). To our knowledge, there are no tangible systems based on this math concept. We developed an initial tangible based mixed-reality(MR) setup with a small tabletop projector and depth camera. Our goal was observing children's interaction with the setup to guide our further design process towards developing nonsymbolic math training. In this paper, we present our observations from sessions with four 3-to-5 year old children and discuss their meaning for future work. Initial clues show that our MR setup leads to exploratory and mindful interactions, which might be generalizable to other tangible MR systems for child education and could inspire interaction design studies.

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