Çevre ile bütünleşen etkileşim: Oyunla öğrenmeye bir örnek

For a child, play is one of the most suitable ways to try the ideas and advance in knowledge without being controlled by grownups. In the absence of a limitation, every item and present environment become a proper medium in a child's mind and/or imagination. As children use their senses to interact with the physical world, by creating new interactions, our spaces could become the medium of today's playful learning environment. With the ability of being unprejudiced, children could use exploration and basic reasoning to amass inputs from the surroundings. Within this context, children naturally gain experiences by exploring and interacting without secondary thoughts in mind. This simple ability could contribute to the design of enhanced spaces, materials and objects embodying interaction for playful learning. From this understanding any environment and any object existing in the environment holds the potential of becoming the material of the play. The presence of technology can be always argued. With the power of computation, by using embedded systems, it is possible to enrich every material, accordingly every object and space. This enables spaces to increase their interactive affordances, leading a more unified relation between the physical and the digital world. The design of interactive environments is founded on the idea of building knowledge through manipulation and transformation of interactions. To provide a joyful sense and motivation, physicality and accordingly the interactions hold an important place in a child's learning process. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the potentials of embodied interaction within the space as a medium, which encourage children in their natural playful learning process with the help of technology enhanced environments with the isuues of use of technology for learning in free-play, interactive settings and space as a technology embedded medium. This thesis envisions an idea with the objective of generating a prototype of an interactive space, which is the result of literature as well as the author's observations and experiments. The prototype is developed through both physical and digital experiments regarding playful learning. The experiments were carried out in two phases. First, the preliminary setup (the analog phase), secondly, the interactive prototype. In the first phase, a physical experiment was conducted with two four years old children to observe the free play with/within the affordances and the limits of the environment. This study enabled the observation of the behaviours of participants in a free physical environment. In the second phase, the translation of physical data into digital is explored via experiments, which were carried out by the author with the results of the first phase. Also, the children from the preliminary setup participated in this experiment to play with the developed prototype. The aim was to collect data by analyzing the inherent actions of children and the process of making sense during play. As the physical experiments were dynamic systems by their nature, this aspect is represented in digital medium as well to visualize and analyze the potential advantages and deficiencies of such interactive environments for learning. For digital manipulations, Arduino is selected, since this medium is capable of transforming and representing analog data into digital and/or physical data. The focus of the research is to develop knowledge that is acquired from the both digital and physical experiments. The developed prototype basically captures and transforms the analog data into an interactive medium where children could use their reasoning for occurring representations in the process of playful learning. Consequently, the study aims to find one of many answers to the idea of creating spaces that encourage children in experiencing playful learning through interaction.