DIO is a novel digital-physical construction toolkit to enable constructionist learning for children from age group 8-12 years. The toolkit comprises of dome-shaped (D) tangible modules with various attachments that allow suspension on the body of multiple children and/or in the environment to support a variety of sensing/input (I), actuation/output (O) functionalities. The modules are enabled for wireless communication and can be linked together using an Augmented Reality based programming interface running on a smartphone. The smartphone recognizes our hemispherical modules omnidirectionally through novel computer vision based 3D patterns; custom made to provide logical as well as semantic encoding. In this paper, we show how, owing to its unique form-factor, the toolkit enables multi-user constructions for the children and offers a shared learning experience. We further reflect on our learning from a one-year long iterative design process and contribute a social scaffolding based procedure to engage K-12 children with such constructionist toolkits effectively.

Possibilities of interactions enabled by DIO
Different types of Input-Output modules and variety of attachments developed in our toolkit

Jatin Arora, Kartik Mathur, Manvi Goel, Piyush Kumar, Abhijeet Mishra, and Aman Parnami. 2019. Design and Evaluation of DIO Construction Toolkit for Co-making Shared Constructions. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 3, 4, Article 127 (December 2019), 25 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3369833