Feeling the untouchable: Haptic touch experiences for naturalistic learning

As we confront the global sustainability challenges of our time, schools need to address modern culture's disassociation with the natural world. Our transformative vision is to bring to life naturalistic learning through touch experiences, thereby creating cognitive and affective connections between school students' science learning and their personal and societal relevance. We will co-design new pedagogies that include digital haptic experiences to engage students in the exploration of the natural world and help construct conceptual models.

Science education has struggled to utilise touch adequately beyond early years, as concepts and models become more abstract, but even the arts emphasise the visual and in many contexts discourage touching. We explore how reclaiming the value of touch can bring significant innovation in the way young people come to learn, but also in how they can use technology to make sense of change in their urban and natural surroundings, the interface between the two, and connect their learning to today's global challenges. Observing and understanding qualitative perceptions of scale, density, texture and pattern crosscut topics in science and the arts. We will pursue a STEAM (STEM + the Arts) approach to education that also opens the way for schools to participate in emergent areas of radical citizen science, which advocate a more bottom-up and inclusive approach, 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 haptic experiences across the primary and secondary school syllabus. Explore topics where students are expected to develop conceptual models of abstract concepts, e.g. topics involving fields, flows and currents, starting with Electric Circuits, where we will enable students to feel circuit diagrams shown on a screen to help construct conceptual models accounting for current, voltage, and...