TOWARDS A TANGIBLE USER INTERFACE EMBEDDED COMPUTING PROTOTYPE FOR CHILD EDUCATION

Technology has been increasingly present in people's lives, becoming, in some cases, fundamental. Following this tendency, it also has gained significant influence in assisting education. Today it is possible to find tablets, educational platforms and several other technological solutions and devices in many schools, serving as a support or as the object of study itself. The purpose of these tools is to enrich the school activities, making classes more interactive and stimulating, expanding the repertory of the educator in real time. Despite a large number of technological tools, not all of them promote interaction among students. With this in mind, some researchers have developed projects focused on education based on tangible user interfaces (TUI), in which the fundamental idea is to increase the real physical world by joining digital information to everyday objects and the environment. The objective of this project is to employ TUI to create a functional embedded computational prototype, easy to use, with no need of a tablet or computer, and cost-effective. The prototype is composed of a control station, in which cubes, representing numbers, can be connected to interact with an educational game. There is also an embedded microcontroller platform, in this case, a Raspberry Pi, hidden from the user, which serves as the central brain of the platform, receiving inputs from the user and generating outputs to the graphical interface. The platform can be plugged into a television so the student can see and interact with developed educational applications, motivating the student to learn some basic mathematical concepts, like numbering order and basic expressions. This prototype can be easily expanded, offering educational applications to train grammar, foreign languages, and more complex mathematical exercises.