David Verweij

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FireFlies

FireFlies is a set of tangible 'pixels', each for one student in a high school classroom. Using a tablet, the teacher can colour the bottom half of these pixels individually or as a group. The students can rotate the outer shell of their pixel to change the colour of the top half. The pixels allow teachers and students to communicate with each other in a non-verbal, personal and persistent manner. The meaning of the colours are up to the classes to decide, but students can indicate things like 'do not disturb', or 'I have a question', and teacher can indicate 'silence please' or 'I want to see you' - without verbally disturbing other students. This project explored how offloading communication onto individual 'pixels' would help teachers in their everyday jobs.

Contribution

For this project, I was responsible for the setup, execution and analysis of the research deployment in schools. Aside from debugging and slightly altering the tablet app, the prototype was built before my involvement.

Tools

  • Android app (Processing for Android - Java)

Links

research paper, paper presentation video, short explainer video