Embodied Coding!

As part of the ITLS 6270 Digital Making course, I designed an embodied interface that can support children to learn programming in a screen-free way. The idea was inspired by off-the-shelf coding bots (such as Cubetto and Botley ) that preschool educators use in classrooms to teach programming to children in a screen-free way. These bots have tiles of different colors, and they move by arranging these colored tiles on a standalone controller. Often children find it hard to understand the relationship between the movement and the tiles to program the bot. To support this connection, sometimes the instructor engages children in sensorimotor activities. One such activity is randomly drawing the colored tiles and asking children to move based on what the tile signifies. So, if the color drawn is green, the children take a step forward, as green signifies forward movement. This activity is intended to help establish the symbols-movement connection. This is also similar to Papert's idea of body syntonicity in the context of learning LOGO turtle.

Inspired by this activity, I designed an embodied interface that is likely to help children explore the symbol-movement connection in relation to their bodies. For the prototype, I themed it on Pokemon (See Figure 1), and the goal of the activity is to make the Pokemon find food on the floor by decoding a color code sequence (See Figure 2 and Figure 3). I used the Adafruit Circuit Playground along with MPU 6050 sensor to implement the prototype. As one walks on the floor with the Pokemon, the color on the LED lights up based on the move type—forward, backward, left turn, or right turn (See Figure 3).

Currently, the prototype is partially functional as I could only use the values of the Adafruit accelerometer and not that of MPU 6050 sensor. There is likely some loose connection in the conductive thread wiring. Fixing that, I will be able to implement both the left and right turn functionality with greater precision and accuracy.

• Adafruit Circuit Playground - 1
• MPU 6050 sensor -1
• Conductive Thread ( ~ 0.5 m)
• Needle
• External LED
• Felt paper (different colors - Grey, Red, Yellow)
• Pen and Paper (For template)

Drew the Pokemon and used the paper template to cut the felt.

• Sewed the external LED and MPU 6050 using the conductive thread
• Here is the connection (MPU6050 to Circuit Playground)
• VCC to 3.3V
• GND to Adafruit Circuit Playground GND
• SCL to Adafruit Circuit Playground A4
• SDA to Adafruit Circuit Playground A5

Here is the link to the code : LINK

The reference values need to be calibrated, and the project is ready to be tested for Forward and Backward motion.

As shared earlier, currently it's a partially functional prototype, and I'm yet to implement the Left and Right turn functionality.