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Playing with the sound maker: do embodied metaphors help children learn?

Published: 11 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of a comparative study that explores the potential benefits of using embodied interaction to help children, aged 7 to 10, learn abstract concepts related to musical sounds. Forty children learned to create musical sound sequences using an interactive sound making environment. Half the children used a version of the system that instantiated a body-based metaphor in the mapping layer connecting body movements to output sounds. The remaining children used a version of the same environment that did not instantiate a metaphor in the mapping layer. In general, children were able to more accurately demonstrate sound sequences in the embodied metaphor based system version. However, we observed that children often resorted to spatial rather than body-based metaphors and that the mapping must be easily discoverable as well as metaphorical to provide benefit.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    IDC '08: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children
    June 2008
    289 pages
    ISBN:9781595939944
    DOI:10.1145/1463689
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 11 June 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. children
    2. embodied interaction
    3. embodied schema
    4. interactive environments
    5. metaphor
    6. music
    7. sound
    8. tangibles

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    • (2024)Supporting Physically Active CS-Ed for Children: Exploring the Design of Physical Play Friendly Coding BlocksExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650973(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)On the Benefits of Image-Schematic Metaphors when Designing Mixed Reality SystemsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642925(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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    • (2023)MR.Brick: Designing A Remote Mixed-reality Educational Game System for Promoting Children’s Social & Collaborative SkillsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581041(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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