Touch At! – Designing interactive assistive touch technologies for children with intellectual disabilities
The purpose of this project is to investigate how interactive assistive touch based technologies for children with intellectual disabilities (ID) in grade 6-9 in the Swedish Compulsory school for children with learning disabilities (särskola) can be designed. The project will work with user centred design, and investigate how children with ID, teachers, families, care takers, and adults with ID can participate as co-designers in the development process. The interdisciplinary project consortium will consist of researchers from Interaction design at Chalmers University of Technology, Learning, Communication and IT and Psychology at University of Gothenburg, Läsö special education school at Hovåsskolan in Gothenburg and Primacura daily activity centre in Borås. The focus of the design driven research investigations will be on applications for training social and emotional behaviour. The goal is to design and evaluate a range of different assistive applications focusing on the child’s social and emotional behaviour, and develop a framework consisting of methods and means for how to design and evaluate technology for and with this user group. The development and testing will take place in the class room, and the results and applications from the project will be openly accessible for all through the project website, articles and presentations in relevant journals and conferences.
Makerskola – Makerspace i skolan
Project Makerspace in school aims to contribute to innovation in Swedish schools by creating a physical and virtual test environment to systematically conduct research, test and evaluate concepts, digital literacy and learning in programming, makerspace and maker culture. The project aims to create better conditions for digital learning in the bridge between the physical and digital worlds. The test environment will include students, teachers and school principals from the included test schools. It will also include companies that retail and create the tools (digital to analog) that the project needs, as well as research, teacher training and informal learning environments such as science centers.
The project will be organized in the design of a decentralized test-bed, where it operates as close to practice as possible. Concepts, tools, materials and methods vary depending on the age of the students and circumstances. There are various specific test beds for different school types and ages. Test beds regarding teacher training, procurement and informal learning are needed for the future.
iREAD
iRead is a 4-year (2017-2020) project that aims to develop personalised learning technologies to support reading skills. This software combines a diverse set of personalised learning applications and teaching tools for formative assessment. The project focuses on primary school children across Europe, learning to read and learning English as a foreign language including children with dyslexia who are at risk of exclusion from their education. The project is funded by the EU H2020 and comprises 17 partners from across industry and education in 9 European countries. The work is organised into three strands: innovation, design and evaluation, with different expected outcomes and stakeholders. The University of Gothenburg participates in the project as an expert on technology design with and for children.
More information about iRead can be found here: https://iread-project.eu/
PLACED – Place and Activity-Centric Dynamic Library Services
How can new and dynamic digital services help libraries transform into vibrant urban innovation hubs by supporting knowledge creation activities among citizens and turning this knowledge into an ever-growing part of the urban community’s shared resources?
The PLACED project introduces a new type of place- and activity-centric digital library services. Whereas library services typically focus on providing access to a collection of media, PLACED services support activities in the library. The groundbreaking aspect is that these services capture knowledge generated through these activities, make them a part of the library’s collection, and allow future library users to explore and access them. In this way, PLACED services help break down the institutional walls of the library and make it an integrated part of urban life by creating an ever-evolving collection built on urban activities and knowledge generation.
NU GÖR VI DET – App för att uppmuntra och lära sig om nya aktiviteter
Syftet med projektet är att utveckla en app på temat “aktiv fritid”. Många med funktionsnedsättningar har svårt att komma iväg på olika aktiviteter. För många ligger svårigheten i att ta sig från “ett ställe-A” till “ett nytt ställe-B” och förstå vad som behöver göras för att komma från A till B. Vad måste jag göra först, sen och ytterligare för att till slut komma iväg på det jag vill göra. Det man har rutin för att göra går ganska enkelt att göra men om man skall iväg på någon ny aktivitet så är det svårt. Det är svårare att få en överblick över vad som skall hända och därför är det lättare att välja den enkla och “säkra” vägen, dvs att vara kvar hemma och inte göra det där nya som man inte känner till. Som liten provar många barn på olika aktiviteter, barn med svårigheter gör inte det i samma utsträckning. När barnen med olika svårigheter blir äldre är de mer kritiska till att prova på nya saker och behöver då stöd att ta steget att våga prova. De behöver verktyg och stöttning. Med appen vill vi åstadkomma ett verktyg där vuxna och barn kan mötas i de diskussioner man för då man skall ta sig iväg på en fritidsaktivitet. Vi vill underlätta för personer att komma på vilken aktivitet de kan göra och därefter lära sig om vilka steg de behöver ta för att gå från A-B där resultatet är att komma iväg på en fritids aktivitet. Appen kommer att utvecklas för både iPad och Android. Målgruppen är individer med funktionshinder men denna app kommer att fungera för alla barn o ungdomar även dem utan funktionshinder. NYTTAN: Fler personer blir mer aktiva och får möjlighet att skapa nya fritidsintressen och umgås med andra i sociala sammanhang.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
PREVIOUS RESEARCH PROJECTS
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
EMOTE
The EMOTE (EMbOdied-perceptive Tutors for Empathy-based learning) project will design, develop and evaluate a new generation of artificial embodied tutors that have perceptive capabilities to engage in empathic interactions with children in geography classes in a shared physical space. Overall, the EMOTE project aims to (1) research the role of pedagogical and empathic interventions in the process of engaging the learner and facilitating their learning progress and (2) explore if and how the exchange of socio-emotional cues with an embodied tutor in a shared physical space can create a sense of connection and social bonding and act as a facilitator of the learning experience.
FörskoleVis
The aim of the project is to explore and design concepts for educating preschool children in sustainable development and energy. Project Partners are SP, Interactive Institute Swedish ICT and 5 municipalities in Sweden. The project is funded by Energimyndigheten, Västra Götalandsregionen and Naturskyddsföreningen. The project ends in 2015.
Digitalverkstan
Digitalverkstan is a project financed by the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth and aims at engaging young people aged 18-30 in digital literacy, creation, innovation and entrepreneurship.
https://www.tii.se/projects/digitalverkstan
Hackerklubben
Hackerklubben is more of a quest than a project, an ambition to educate and inspire children in science and technology in general and programming more specifically. Hackerklubben first appeared at the Göteborg Cultural Festival 2013. It reappears at the FSCONS 2013 conference. Through experiential learning practices children learn to program, solder and create digital innovations in an iterative design process, under the guidance by researchers at Interactive Institute Swedish ICT. Hackerklubben is a cooperation with Göteborg Hackerspace and Collaboratory.
https://www.tii.se/projects/hackerklubben
Funktek
Funktek is a co-creative design project targeting museums and people with special needs. The aim of the project is to design and develop new forms of experiences for specific target groups through a user centered design process.
https://www.tii.se/projects/funktek
Digital DIY-instrument
Instrument building and music creation workshop at the Old Ox Music Festival in Mariestad, June 2013.
CoDAC
CoDAC (Conditions and tools for Development of Arithmetic Competences) is a joint project between Kristianstad University and University of Gothenburg. The project aims at investigating how children develop arithmetic comptence, especially basic number concepts, in interaction with peer and adults and with symbolic and material artefacts and to describe this development in terms of learning trajectories. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).
Artefactecologies among children and teenagers – a complex relation
Funded by Adlerbertska, the project “Artefactecologies among children and teenagers – a complex relation” investigates what relations there are between children, artefacts, people, IT etc around them, and what type of relations they have with these. The projects sets out to interview children in schools, as well as children in special education in Sweden. The project is a joint research cooperation with Center for Participatory IT in Aarhus, Denmark.
DEVICE-DEsign for Vulnerable generatIons: Children and Elderly
EU-funded project aiming to bridge traditional industrial design programs with ergonomics, usability concepts and user experience approaches with a specific focus on vulnerable generations. It intends to address the need to modernize and develop educational programs with a specific focus on vulnerable generations and, ultimately, being a milestone towards the modernization of design education.
TA2
How can technology help to nurture family-to-family relationships? This is the question asked by the collaborative project “Together Anywhere, Together Anytime” (TA2). For many people, families form the key social unit. Many of our enduring experiences, holidays, celebrations and moments of fun and laughter are framed as family events. This is something that current technology does not address well: modern media and communications serve individuals best, with phones, computers and electronic games devices tending to be individually owned and providing individual experiences. TA2 seeks to redress this imbalance, by exploring how technology can support group to group communication.
https://www.tii.se/projects/ta2
The Interactive Children’s Library
The project developed prototypes of new IT services and physical installations embedded in the physical spaces of the library that challenge, support and promote curiosity in kids play and learning activities . The prototypes will be sufficiently open, understandable and robust to be part in the activities of children of all ages. The basic outset for the research and innovation processes is that the developed technologies are not just deployed, understood and used, but appropriated in use – the artefacts get their full function and meaningfulness in use by the children and librarians. The future Interactive Children’s Library should give room for and encourage the physical activites of children, while pursuing to connect this with the basic services of the library e.g. story telling, information and access to a rich variety of media.
http://www.interactivespaces.net/projects/project.php?The+Interactive+Children%27s+Library
Families at Play In the Library
The overall goal is to collect knowledge about families and play and develop and test models and concepts for families with children, especially within play and play culture in relation to libraries. The project’s models and concepts must represent breakthroughs and radical innovation in relation to the existing experiences in public libraries.
Website: www.legende-familier.dk/english
iSchool
The vision of this project is to develop software infrastructure, GUI’s and spatial concepts for new interactive school environments. The project aims to develop an open and “fluent” information technology with sufficient accessibility and robustness to support learning in and outside the physical limits of the school. The projects aims to create a learning space where the everyday cultural competences, the curiosity and the narrative skills and desires of children and adolescents meet the outside world that surrounds them, the teacher and the school. Also both students and teachers are provided with the means of experiencing coherence between the use if digital and physical materials across school libraries, classrooms and on fieldtrips
http://www.interactivespaces.net/projects/project.php?iSchool