Helping digital learning become physically interactive

When combining my interests for education and architecture, I started to think about how digital technologies were impacting on the teaching of subjects within our schools, and in particular, within maths.

Currently digital technologies and teaching maths fuse together mainly through web based, or at least screen based, maths tasks which are reliant upon the students maintaining interest in looking at a computer screen for long periods of time. This can become boring, especially for younger children who become fidgety!

On the other hand, however, classrooms are full of physical maths aids, such as abacus', movable clocks, counting blocks, etc.

What I'd like to look into is combining these two elements into a spatial, tangible learning experience, which uses digital technologies embedded in physical objects or environments to generate ideas and help the learning process. This could easily be translated into other subjects, such as English, science, geography, history, foreign languages, etc.

I'm sure there are precedents of this that have been looked into already and over the next few days, I'd like to look into any existing research that has been carried out.

So far I have found one learning proposal, suggested by Larissa Alexander at Stanford University, which talks about creating a series of blocks, which when linked together add up on a counter below and feed back the total number.

I like this idea, however I'd like to go further by looking into how children learn, and instead of returning a number straight away, creating a system which challenges the child into thinking about the answer of the task, before the real answer is declared.

I'd also like to make the spatial experience into one which is even more tangible and physical, perhaps even linking it into P.E. classes or full internal/external space designs.

Another quick blog post I stumbled across is one by UpsideLearning, which explains how digital technologies embodied in physical objects can aid learning and which digital technologies could be employed to do this.