In this project, my partner Aashna Sharaf and I built an educational toolkit helping teach kids between the age of 7-9 years the basics of logic and boolean operations. Computer science is a fundamental literacy today; however, when computer science is taught, it is often through computer screens and digital apps. This often poses significant access issues especially in countries like India and Vietnam. To address this problem of poor computer science/computational thinking education in the early years, we created hands-on, tactile learning materials that break down the fundamental ideas of logic gates and boolean operators for children as young as age seven.

The specific learning outcomes for this toolkit are as follows:

1. By engaging with the kit, learners will be introduced to the basic concept of boolean logic and operators (using physical logic gates), specifically AND, OR and NOT.

2. Learners will predict outputs to given inputs in a specific circuit system/set up in binary form

3. Learners will be able to randomise challenges to address authentic computational problems related to turning inputs into a desired output

4. Learners will be able to visualise the flow of electricity as it interacts with logic gates

5. Learners will be empowered to build complex computational systems to convert inputs into respective outputs.

We did a comprehensive search for other such products that teach about logic gates and saw that there wasn’t a single educational toolkit that uses the mechanisms and structure we conceived. Most simulators were digital only such as circuit verse and academo. These allowed a high degree of complexity but did not help with physical visualisation and processing. Then there were games such as card games and dominos. They were less dynamic in nature and didn’t help users visualise the flow of signals. As such, there wasn’t a single toy that combined the affordance of digital and physical representation. That’s exactly what we set out to do.

Before finalizing our design, we went through around 20 iterations with different adjustments to details in our design. However, in this part of the report, for conciseness, we are going to describe some major developments in our design of the learning toy set. 

Initially, we came up with the idea of using 2*2*2 cubes with pathways on the top to help children learn about digital circuitry. The photo on the left shows an OR gate with glue gun representing the pathway. [Iteration 1]

However, as the design does not allow for intuitive interactions with the marble and trying to understand the logic gates using these blocks would require the children to read through instructions carefully, we decided to change our design. After doing a lot of literature review and browsing similar products about logic gates, we were finally able to come up with a mechanism for the AND and OR gate, ready to start our second design. We were determined that we would design a seesaw for these gates, and the weight of the marbles would help the users differentiate the number of inputs. This design required us to iterate many times as a slight difference in the dimensions of any components or the weight of any part would result in a great change in the way the block works.  [Iteration 2]

In some iterations, we also designed sliders that decide the number of inputs into the gates. However, after testing the product with some of our classmates, we found that they were confused by the presence of the sliders and did not really get how the gates work intuitively.