Shaping Perception: Designing for Participatory Facilitation of Collaborative Geometry

Geometris is a technologically enabled, body-scale, educational game, in which collaborating players recreate target polygons, prompted on a digital screen, by activating a set of sensors–vertices on a large physical mat interface. We report on an evaluation study that draws on theoretical frameworks from ecological dynamics, genetic epistemology, and socio-cultural semiotics. Micro-analysis of three adult–child groups at play implicates two design features supporting mediated development of geometry skills: (1) spatial distribution across two displays – the screen and the mat – poses cross-display figural mapping as a tactical problem whose perceptual solution constitutes the game’s learning objective; (2) a multi-sensor input interface – the mat’s ‘vertices’ – enables flexible divisions of group labor for scaffolding solution enactment. We put forth the construct of participatory facilitation – an emergent interaction pattern in groups with inter-personal differences in content-domain knowledge and sensorimotor co-ordination. We tentatively generalize principles for designing informal educational activity architecture that create opportunities for relative experts to enculturate content learning via participatory facilitation.