Abstract
In this paper we report work in progress on éTui, a prototype of a computational educational toy meant to facilitate young children's reflection upon learning. The interface of this type of devices is quite nonstandard and two of its closely interrelated elements are appearance and behaviors. We describe their design and our results in the context of achieving the educational goal. The importance of appearance has been emphasized by Microsoft's researchers on ActiMates Barney (Strommen, 1998) and (Strommen & Alexander, 1999); and commercial successes such as Furby also demonstrate it. We discuss our approach to emotional engagement through characterization while seeking to minimize gender bias, and avoiding appearances, which are deceptive with respect to behavior. Our final design is a moving toy which has an insect-like appearance. We also describe how we have implemented our methodological approach which is co-design with the children. The movements of the toy are of the type of autonomous robots and we are exploring whether these autonomous behaviors provide a richer (or different) motivation for reflection upon learning, differing from more traditional approaches which follow Papert's work on Logo (Papert, 1980), and more recent and evolved robotics approaches such as, Lego Mindstorms (Martin, Mikhak, Resnick, Silverman, & Berg, 2000), Crickets...