Prof Advaith Siddharthan

Our transformational vision is to bring to life Learning through Touch, in the natural world and through digital haptic interfaces, fostering a ‘naturalistic intelligence’ and creating affective connections between what we learn and their personal and societal relevance. Science education has struggled to utilise touch adequately beyond the early years, as concepts and models become more abstract, but also the arts emphasise to visual and in many contexts discourage touching. We suggest that reclaiming the value of touch can bring significant innovation in the way young people can come to learn, but also how they understand their urban and natural surroundings, and specifically, the interface between the two. We will augment natural touch with new haptic interfaces to smartphone and tablet touchscreens based on vibrotactile actuators, that will allow students to ‘touch the otherwise untouchable’, such as textures from nature at different magnifications, or electric fields and currents to help them construct conceptual models. Observing and understanding qualitative perceptions of scale, density, texture and pattern crosscut topics in science and the arts, and arts-based methods will be integrated with science learning as part of a STEAM (STEM + the Arts) approach to education. We will also use touch to open the way for schools to participate in emergent areas of radical citizen science, which advocate a more bottom-up and inclusive approach, sensitive to local context and allowing imaginative flexibility in responding to the new questions of a changing global environment. Our research objectives are to: 1. Develop the possibilities of science learning through digital touch across the primary and secondary school syllabus in topics where students are expected to develop conceptual models of abstract concepts; e.g. topics involving fields and flows, starting with Electric Circuits, where we will enable students to touch electricity on circuits shown on a screen to help construct conceptual models accounting for current, voltage, and resistance. 2. Co-design touch-centred Citizen Science methods for school grounds that use textures from nature to develop pattern-led thinking about underlying structures of natural artefacts. Touch (in nature and through digital interfaces) will be used as a starting point to stimulate progressive inquiries about how plants and animals respond to a changing environment. Schools will then modify their grounds in support of wildlife based on their inquiries. 3. Co-design interfaces for creating and experiencing patterns and textures in art through touch, including interfaces to feel existing artworks, and a sketching tool that allows students to feel drawn lines and textures as they draw them. We will explore Edinburgh Collections’ archive of fieldwork sketches from Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, combining geological and evolutionary observations as part of a STEAM approach. 4. Understand the impact of these digital and natural touch interventions on cognition, learning, interest, creativity and socialisation with respect to science learning and artistic exploration, including for students with visual impairments, for whom touch is central to sensing the world, and for creating, interacting with and sharing artistic creations. Through pursuing these objectives, we will probe the affective possibilities of a new sensing science, which turns abstract into concrete and distant into intimate. As part of this, we will revolutionise citizen science practice for school students, initiating intuitive bottom-up scientific inquiries through affective methods that lead to attitudinal change and environmentally friendly behaviours. At the same time, we will also advance computing research by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of haptic digital interfaces in relation to tactile learning with physical props, and developing best practice for designing haptic interfaces for learning.