Building a Tangible Serious Game Framework for Elementary Spatial and Geometry Concepts

Tangible learning is a promising branch, especially for scientific learning, allowing an enhanced sensorial involvement and participation by children. While a lot is being done on the side of programming, less has been investigated on elementary spatial and geometric concepts. The paper presents i-Vertex, an open-hardware framework for tangible serious games on geometry concepts for primary school pupils. The framework targets spatial reasoning and includes music as a related and complementary feature, which should add value also for usability. i-Vertex supports collaboration between kids and the key role of a teacher as an adult that interacts with the children in different ways, introducing them to the discovery and understanding of basic geometric concepts and physical phenomenon. At present, we have built a prototype, featuring a very limited number of vertices, and functionally tested it in lab, in two main scenarios covering topics such as lines and triangles. Based on the successful feedback of this experiment, we intend to proceed further, upgrading the platform with a more powerful and product oriented micro-controller and board.