An active tangible user interface framework for teaching and learning artificial intelligence

Interactive and tangible computing platforms have garnered increased interest in the pursuit of embedding active learning pedagogies within curricula through educational technologies. Whilst Tangible User Interface (TUI) systems have successfully been developed to edutain children in various research, TUI architectures have seen limited deployment in more complex and abstract domains. In light of these limitations, this paper proposes an active TUI framework that addresses the challenges experienced in teaching and learning artificial intelligence (AI) within higher educational institutions. The proposal extends an aptly designed tabletop TUI architecture with the novel interactive paradigm of active tangible manipulatives to provide a more engaging and effective user interaction. The paper describes the deployment of the proposed TUI framework within an undergraduate laboratory session to aid in the teaching and learning of artificial neural networks. The experiment is assessed against currently adopted educational computer software and the obtained results highlight the potential of the proposed TUI framework to augment students’ gain in knowledge and understanding of abstracted threshold concepts in higher education.

© ACM, 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 535-546. (2018-03-05), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3172944.3172976

Published as:
Clifford De Raffaele, Serengul Smith, and Orhan Gemikonakli. 2018. An Active Tangible User Interface Framework for Teaching and Learning Artificial Intelligence. In 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 535-546. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3172944.3172976