A Tangible Manipulative for Inclusive Quadrilateral Learning

Over the last decade, extensive growth in digital educational content has opened up new opportunities for teaching and learning. Despite such advancements, digital learning experiences often omit one of our richest and earliest learning modalities - touch. This lack of haptic (touch) interaction creates a growing gap in supporting inclusive, embodied learning experiences digitally. Our research centers on the development of inclusive learning tools that can flexibly adapt for use in different learning contexts to support learners with a wide range of needs, co-designed with students with disabilities. In this paper, we focus on the development of a tangible device for geometry learning - the Tangible Manipulative for Quadrilaterals (TMQ). We detail the design evolution of the TMQ and present two user studies investigating the affordances of the TMQ and the user strategies employed when explored in isolation and in tandem with a two-dimensional touchscreen-based rendering of a quadrilateral. Findings illustrate the affordances of the TMQ over traditional, static media and its ability to serve as an inclusive geometry learning tool.