Dr Lisa Bowers

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.

For distance learning students often it is difficult to facilitate creative studio-based activities in the same format as conventional universities. This can result in a short fall of distance learning students ‘maker-process’ skills and practice. The benefits of haptic technology for applied online education, such as e-crafts and e-design practice, is that it enables and enriches the student’s hands-on approach. Currently haptic technology is able to aid students’ interactions to 3D virtual environments. However, haptics that could afford greater sensory engagements with the maker-process with a fidelity akin to real-world is still to be developed. This project aims to embed haptics within a variety of ‘hands-on’ methods, designed by Open University (Engineering and Innovation school) academics. This will enable the development of a working haptic prototype which will focus on haptics and the ‘maker-process’ aiming to add value to core learning technology resources for undergraduate and post graduate programmes. In line with the OU’s ‘access to learning policies’ there is a greater onus placed onto inclusive learning, and the provision of accessible learning technology to include a variety of learners with a range of needs e.g. sensory impairment, motor skills etc… By increasing access to virtual immersive technologies a wider student body could be given access to engage with their own version of the maker-process using multimodal interactions.

This project will explore the potential of a user-led multi-modal virtual studio environment that will facilitate touch and audio access for students with sight impaired acuities. The proposed sensory-based system will solve issues related to the sight impaired community of practitioners and students across a broad range of educational needs including, but not limited to, creative arts, engineering, and science. The sight impaired community who often feel alienated by the viso-centric nature of current computer-aided design (CAD) systems crucially need new tools to facilitate online access to CAD processes and workflows.