No One Excluded: Designing Multisensory Environments’ Experiences for Children’s Learning

The increasing debate about personalized and multimodal educational processes, arisen in the literature in the latest years, pointed out the noteworthy potentialities (Hwang, 2013) that an adaptive and synesthetic experience can have in helping children, especially those with special educational needs (Pares, 2005) improve their abilities. This work describes the design and development of Magika (Gelsomini, 2019), a multisensory and multimodal environment that incorporates digital world projected on the wall and on the floor with a large number of connected objects such as toys, ambient lights and materials that allow children to experience tactile, auditory, visual, and olfactory stimuli. Multisensory and multimodal approaches are grounded on the theories of embodied cognition and sensory integration that emphasizes the formative role of embodiment – the way an organism’s sensorimotor capacities enable it to successfully interact with the physical environment – in the development of cognitive skills such as mental imagery, working and implicit memory, reasoning and problem solving (Ayres, 1972). The variety of learning styles, methods and interaction paradigms that Magika provides, enables different levels of support for children with the most diverse attitudes, the result is a more balanced learning approach that leads to greater attention, understanding, comprehension, and retention (Fleming, 2001). Magika’s design started with a human centered design (HCD) approach, Co-Designed with more than 30 specialists at local care centers and primary schools and changed the role of teachers from being rather marginal as in current state-of-art solutions to be the core of a new accessible Co-Design process, considering all players’ characteristics and needs in their singularity and diversity. To this extent, the system is connected to an interface for educators that enables them to control the level of stimuli and their progression; define and share a countless number of game-based learning activities; customize such activities to the evolving needs of each child. In particular, the customization process starts with an “onboarding” phase in which children are required to perform simple activities aiming at outlining their personal profile and suggesting the most suitable experience to be played, according to the profile of the player who interacts. Magika aims at reducing the obstacles that children could encounter in key phases of their growth by recognizing and fostering children’s inclusiveness, and less inconvenience for children and their families will experiment new educational and therapeutic approaches. Results from a preliminary exploration phase in 2 primary schools show the potential of using an HCD approach in enhancing children playful learning experiences. Combining multimodal interactions and strong personalization features, Magika offers unique ways of learning that have only been initially explored but have already shown its potential.