Abstract
Touching is one of the best ways humans to communicate with the world around them. For many decades, a tactile learning approach has been applied in child education as one of the most effective learning methods to maximise children’s learning ability. However, there are few approaches and toolkits that enhance tactile material study on education for school-aged children. This study introduces and demonstrates different approaches of material study with different age groups of young people. It presents the benefits, implementation and challenges of the material study in children’s education. The aims are three-fold: 1) to stimulate children’s interest in and recognition of materials, 2) to demonstrate material study approaches with different aged children, and 3) to accentuate the benefits and limits of the material study approaches. As the results significantly reveal, materials as a medium offer children valuable opportunities to lively develop ideas, actively participate in developing curricular, and adaptively learn new knowledge and skills through practice. These findings suggest that materials engage children’s motivation, participation and satisfaction in their own learning. Furthermore, this research provides adults with a feasible understanding of and communication with children in the design process.
Keywords
Materials; Material study; Learning by doing; Education for children; Toolkits
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2017.112
Citation
Lee, B.(2017) Tangible opportunities: Designing material studies and toolkits for school-aged children, in Elvin Karana, Elisa Giaccardi, Nithikul Nimkulrat, Kristina Niedderer, Serena Camere (eds.), Alive. Active. Adaptive. International Conference on Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials, 19-20 June 2017, Delft and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2017.112
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Tangible opportunities: Designing material studies and toolkits for school-aged children
Touching is one of the best ways humans to communicate with the world around them. For many decades, a tactile learning approach has been applied in child education as one of the most effective learning methods to maximise children’s learning ability. However, there are few approaches and toolkits that enhance tactile material study on education for school-aged children. This study introduces and demonstrates different approaches of material study with different age groups of young people. It presents the benefits, implementation and challenges of the material study in children’s education. The aims are three-fold: 1) to stimulate children’s interest in and recognition of materials, 2) to demonstrate material study approaches with different aged children, and 3) to accentuate the benefits and limits of the material study approaches. As the results significantly reveal, materials as a medium offer children valuable opportunities to lively develop ideas, actively participate in developing curricular, and adaptively learn new knowledge and skills through practice. These findings suggest that materials engage children’s motivation, participation and satisfaction in their own learning. Furthermore, this research provides adults with a feasible understanding of and communication with children in the design process.