While most of the educational systems for challenged learners have been inspired and adapted from developed regions, a little work has been done in implementing such systems for intellectually and developmentally challenged (IDC) children in developing regions. This project called CoinBeam is a physical learning system based on tangible interactions designed to help IDC students to learn the concepts of currency denomination splitting. The functioning of the CoinBeam is analogues to the working of a typical beam balance that is used to compare weights. The pans of the beam are balanced when the value of the weights in both the pans are equal. It is an interactive system that recognizes and responds to the denomination of the coin placed in the pan and reaches an equilibrium position only when it is balanced by the cumulative value of the coins on the other pan.

The designed prototype was informally evaluated after conducting a preliminary user study with 11 participant users. Our findings suggest that students are strongly motivated in adapting to such learning systems that involve their active participation. While this work focuses on a specific use case, our results indicate some intriguing insights about the collaborative, associative and social aspects of these physical learning systems.

This project is designed and developed as a part of the Tangible User Interface (TUI) offered by EILab.
Project team: Samadrita Das, Deepika Mittal, Pooja Dhaka, Dipti Jha

This work was awarded Best Student Paper at 7th International Conference of HCI, IndiaHCI 2015

Learn more about the project from  here