Designing Tangible as an Orchestration Tool for Collaborative Activities

Orchestrating collaborative learning activities is a challenge, even with the support of technology. Tangibles as orchestration tools represent an ambient and embodied approach to sharing information about the learning content and flow of the activity, thus facilitating both collaboration and its orchestration. Therefore, we propose tangibles as a solution to orchestrate productive collaborative learning. Concretely, this paper makes three contributions toward this end: First, we analyze the design space for tangibles as an orchestration tool to support collaborative learning and identify twelve essential dimensions. Second, we present five tangible tools for collaborative learning activities in face-to-face and online classrooms. Third, we present principles and challenges to designing tangibles for orchestrating collaborative learning based on our findings from the evaluation of ten educational experts who evaluated these tools using a usability scale and open questions. The key findings were: (1) they had good usability; (2) their main advantages are ease of use and support for collaborative learning; (3) their main disadvantages are limited functions and the difficulty to scale them to more users. We conclude by providing reflections and recommendations for the future design of tangibles for orchestration.