Agoras: augmented generation of reactive ambients on surfaces. Towards educational places for action, discussion and reflection to support creative learning on interactive surfaces

Abstract

Creativity is a skill of special interest for human development since it is a dimension that allows individuals and, eventually, society to face new problems and challenges successfully. Besides understanding creativity as a set of factors related to the creative individual, it must be considered the intrinsic motivation, the environment as well as other social factors that ultimately can have an effect on the development of such a relevant skill. Thus, it is interesting to explore it in the context of using new information technology. Specifically, because communicative processes, ideas exchange and collabora-tive interaction between individuals are the characteristics behind creative processes which, moreover, are to a great extent facilitated by interactive tabletops, one of the main contributions of this dissertation is precisely exploring the suitability of interactive surfaces in collaborative creative tasks with teenager students. Departing from this study, which provides empirical evidence on the potential for tabletop technology to foster creativity, this thesis presents AGO¬RAS, a middleware for the construction of 2D game ecosystems for tabletops, whose main contribution for the future creative learning environments is the consideration of more rewarding and engaging learning activities as those focused on playing to create games and their subsequent play. In the context of this dissertation, an ecosystem model based on entities to be enacted according to simulated physics has been developed. In addition, a rule approach has been adopted but tailored to support enhanced expressiveness in terms of consequent action parameters to provide logic behavior in the ecosystems. Rules rely on visual dataflow expressions being supported by a suitable editing tool on the surface. All these middleware components along editing and simulation tools have been built on top of a specific interaction toolkit for surfaces developed in this thesis. The model and tools have shown their capability to support the creation of basic and functional game prototypes.