The Tangible Interaction Web was a collaborative project between the Encore Lab at the University of Toronto (OISE) and the Synaesthetic Media Lab (Synlab) at TMU, emerging from a series of Tangible Design Jam workshops within the Educoder research community. The project explored how tangible and embodied interaction technologies, such as active tangibles, tabletop displays, and physical computing devices, could be leveraged to deepen students’ understanding of ecosystems and biodiversity.
In many classrooms, ecological relationships are often introduced through simplified food webs that focus almost exclusively on feeding relationships between species. While this approach conveys basic ideas such as energy flows, it oversimplifies the complexity of ecosystems and makes concepts like symbiosis or competition difficult for students to grasp. The Tangible Interaction Web was designed to address this limitation by modeling a broader range of ecological relationships—including predation, competition, symbiosis, mutualism, and mimicry—giving students a more nuanced and authentic understanding of biodiversity and interdependence.
Using active tangibles representing different organisms, students could build ecosystems directly on an interactive tabletop. By placing, tapping, or stacking these tokens, learners could create ecological relationships that were dynamically visualized through arrows and connections on the tabletop interface. The system also supported the exploration of population changes, perturbations (such as invasive species or pollutants), and ecosystem resilience, enabling learners to experiment with “what if” scenarios in a collaborative, hands-on environment.
My role in this project focused on translating theories of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and embodied cognition into concrete design solutions. Working with a cross-institutional team of researchers and developers, I co-designed tangible interaction scenarios, such as feeding relationships, perturbation simulations, and population modelling, while also developing UX flows that mapped physical actions (e.g., stacking or shaking tokens) to digital responses on the tabletop. These designs ensured interactions were intuitive, pedagogically grounded, and supportive of collaborative inquiry. I also integrated explicit curriculum connections for secondary science education, where concepts such as sustainability, stewardship, and biodiversity could be made more concrete through embodied learning.
The project made use of technologies like Sifteo Cubes, microcontrollers (e.g. Arduino), Processing, and D3. While the underlying technical infrastructure was complex, the focus of my design work was on lowering barriers for participation, creating a system where students could experiment freely with ecological models without needing advanced technical knowledge.
The Tangible Interaction Web contributed to early research on how tangible and embodied technologies can support collaborative sense-making in science education. The project demonstrated that moving beyond “hello world” prototypes toward non-trivial, curriculum-linked applications can open new pathways for learning design.
Through this work, I strengthened my expertise in embodied interaction design and rapid prototyping with open-source platforms. Just as importantly, the project deepened my ability to ask critical questions about the role of tangibles in learning: What new forms of discourse do they enable? How do they reshape collaboration? And how might they support learners in moving from static models toward dynamic, systems-level thinking about the natural world?
Alisa Acosta 