A Systematic Approach Towards Physical Computing Systems for Educations

Physical computing systems come in different shapes and offer a plethora of different opportunities for educational purposes. This is well-known for many years now. In contrast, our research revealed what almost everybody with kids at school has been able to observe: at school in real life, physical computing devices are seldom used. Interviews with school teachers revealed the reasons why this observation is true: one major drawback of these systems is that almost nobody has been able to tell us for which educational purposes a certain physical computing system can be used. Neither in general, nor in a goal-oriented way. Seemingly, the perception of these important educational tools is that they are for playing and nothing more. To allow teachers to change their perspective and to give them tools to integrate these promising and famous devices in their computer science education, an approach is suggested to firstly structure the field and secondly to demonstrate how parts instructional design can take place. Thirdly, a new type of scalable educational physical computing device has been developed. The aim of this chapter is to explicate the results of the first step, which is to structure the field, to find categories, and to show how existing devices can be integrated into the resulting structure.