TUI WooGu
A tangible learning experience for food education and embodied interaction.
2025 Fall
Publication:
Jiaxin Wang, Yili Wen, Hongni Ye, Liang He, Min Fan, and Xin Tong. 2025. “I Want to Use Technology to Help Farmers in the Future”: Enhancing Children’s Understanding of Farming through Tangible User Interfaces and Embodied Interaction. In Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1145/3713043.3728865
Farming, essential to human civilization, has become increasingly disconnected from everyday life, especially for children. This re- search highlights the need for farming education to enhance chil- dren’s understanding of plants, environmental responsibility, and food choices. Traditional methods often struggle with engagement, leading us to develop WooGu, an educational game that integrates digital devices, tangible user interfaces (TUIs), and embodied physi- cal interactions. WooGu provides multi-modal cues and encourages physical engagement through a combination of augmented digital visual elements and 3D-printed tools with integrated sensors, sup- porting embodied farming operations.
Evaluated with 15 children aged 5-12, WooGu enhanced their knowledge of farming, engage- ment, and attitudes toward agriculture. The study also found that WooGu enhanced children’s appreciation of farming and expressed a desire to innovate agricultural practices. These findings suggest that adopting embodied interactions and multi-modal feedback can improve children’s learning of agricultural concepts.
System Design
User Study
