Section: New Results

New version of Teegi and its pedagogical potential

Participants: Jeremy Frey, Fabien Lotte and Martin Hachet

Cerebral activity is an intangible physiological process that is difficult to apprehend, especially for children. To overcome this difficulty, Teegi was designed as a new type of educational support. This tangible interface enables children to discover the relationship between brain activity and the functions of the human body.

This year, we have designed a new version of Teegi (see Figure 7. It is 3D printed, and embeds a Raspberry Pi 3 and NiMh batteries (autonomy of approximately 2 hours). A python script on the Raspberry Pi handles the 402 LEDs (Adafruit Neopixel) covering the “head”, which are connected to its GPIO pins. For a smoother display, the light of the LEDs is diffused by a 3mm thick cap made of acrylic glass. Two 8-by-8 white LEDs matrices picture the eyes. The script also commands the servomotors placed in the hands and feet, 4 Dynamixel XL320.

We used this new version of Teegi as a case of study for developing a multi-methods research approach to estimate the pedagogical potential of a tangible interface used in a real-life educational context. Using this methodology, we conducted a user study (N=29) that highlighted the strengths of this interface, both in terms of its usability and its impact on learning. Moreover, results revealed possible improvements to further increase pedagogical effectiveness. This type of interface, as well as the evaluation method that we propose, contribute to extending our knowledge concerning the pedagogical use of new interactive tools at school.

This work was published at IHM 2017 [22], and the accompanying demo won the best demo award. Teegi was also demonstrated at CHI 2017 [23].

Figure 7. Teegi