Multisensory Technologies to Support Teaching: an Ongoing Project

Technology is increasingly widespread in schools, but it does not always find an application that fits the needs of teachers and students. A reason for that is that stakeholders are often not sufficiently involved in the design process. This paper focuses on multisensory technologies for education and on the initial stages of a design process that involved teachers and researchers with background including computer engineering, cognitive science, and digital humanities. We asked teachers to participate in brainstorming and iterative design sessions aimed at designing educational activities for kindergarten and primary school children. These include activities for a more active attitude of children during roll call, for understanding circularity of time as well as for learning mathematical topics. Questionnaires and structured interviews were used for an initial evaluation. Results are encouraging and the next step will consist in developing the mock-ups realized into applications for use and evaluation in the classroom.