Shadow Box: an interactive learning toy for children Ja-Young Sung 1 , Aaron Levisohn 1 , Ji-won Song 2 , Ben Tomassetti 1 , Ali Mazalek 1 1 Georgia Institute of Technology, 2 Inje University Abstract The Shadow Box is a tangible computing project that exploits visual association and auditory clues to teach children the representational relationship between words and their meanings. The Shadow Box contains three major components: the main box, picture blocks and word blocks. The Shadow Box activates when a block or a matching pair of blocks is placed inside. The box prompts children to find matching blocks and combine them together. When children successfully combine the right word and picture, the box rewards them with an animated video as if they had made the objects come alive. An informal study shows that children responded positively to the concept of the box. They played with it for a length of time and engaged in a collaborative learning process with other children. 1. Introduction Learning is effective when children build new understandings based on active reconstruction of existing knowledge and preconceptions. During the development of literacy skills at an early age, children may experience difficulties learning to read and write if they don’t have a preconception of language’s representational nature. The National Research Council (1999) suggests that young children should learn representational systems during their early literacy development [2]. Children acquire many of the skills necessary to attain literacy prior to the stage of reading- readiness which are also known as pre-reading skills. The acquisition of these skills provides the conceptual framework necessary to achieve higher level skills such as onset recognition fluency (beginning sounds), letter recognition fluency, phonemic segmentation, and ultimately, phonemic awareness, which links directly to reading mastery [5]. The acquisition of such skills is hierarchical, with children generally mastering word- level skills before they master syllable-level skills, syllable-level skills before onset-rime skills, and onset- rime-level skills before phoneme-level skills. This project focuses on helping preschool aged children attain word-level skills. We propose a tangible toy for early literacy development called the “Shadow Box”. The Shadow Box aims to teach the representational nature of written language to three to four year-old children while they are playing with tangible word and object blocks. The Shadow Box consists of three primary components: the shadow box equipped with an RFID reader, as well as picture blocks and word blocks with embedded RFID tags. In order to activate the Shadow Box, a single block or a matching pair of blocks must be placed inside. If the child inserts a word block, the box pronounces and spells the word and prompts the child to look for its matching picture by projecting a static shadow image of the object. A similar sequence is initiated when the child inserts a picture object and is prompted to find the matching word block. When the child successfully matches a picture block with its corresponding word block and places the pair inside the Shadow Box, they are rewarded with an animated movie clip. Figure 1. Shadow Box and word and picture blocks (left). Placement of a word block into the box (right) 2. Related Works Even though computers permit the creation of dynamic content and the development of sophisticated interactive systems, it is still difficult to engage children in realistic settings using screen-based computational media [1]. Conventional computers do not support concurrent interaction and physical exploratory experience which is most familiar to preschool children. To overcome this limitation, many researchers are interested in how tangible technology can help the The First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (DIGITEL'07) 0-7695-2801-5/07 $20.00 © 2007