StretchyStars

Cooperative play begins in preschool, and teaches preschoolers to be more tolerant, focused, and respectful of others. However, preschoolers find difficult to learn how to work together. Nowadays, there are cooperative interactive surfaces for children that focus on improving their creativity and socialization skills. However, there have been few studies on the use of interactive surfaces to promote cooperative play among preschoolers and less research exploring issues around the deployment of cooperative elastic displays.

With a master’s student, we developed StretchyStars, an elastic display encouraging the cooperative play by enabling preschoolers to play sounds when touching, tapping or pinching a spandex fabric encouraging the cooperative play. To play with StretchyStars, preschoolers wear a glove with a color lamp to infer the identity of the child interacting with the fabric. A 3-weeks deployment study, with 30 preschoolers and 4 teachers, shows preschoolers were willing to help each other and work on strategies. Moreover, StretchyStars was perceived as a fun and entertaining game, but, educational enough to be used as teaching material inside the classroom of preschoolers.