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Magnetact Animals: A Simple Kinetic Toy Kit for a Creative Online Workshop for Children

Published: 08 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the global COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020, it has become difficult to hold workshops that bring people together in one place. Consequently, demand for online events and virtual workshops is increasing so as to minimize the loss of learning opportunities. However, providing an experience of building things remotely is not easy because of the time and cost of preparing materials and equipment, and the difficulties of distance teaching. So, we designed a kinetic toy kit that can be sent in an envelope, be constructed with ease, and work without any batteries. The kinetic toy, constructed using magnetic sheets, cardboard, and paper, allows the users to design and create “animals” with variable motions. At the two online workshops we held for 15 participants from 3 to 11 years old, all of the children enjoyed building toys and some participants invented original mechanisms and new animals. In this paper, we describe the details of the toy kit and the online workshops that used it.

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References

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Cited By

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  • (2023)MagneChase: Create Chasing-Capturing Interactions Using Magnetic Potential Barrier for Tangible GamesProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3593900(563-567)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Mixels: Fabricating Interfaces using Programmable Magnetic PixelsProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545698(1-12)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2021
2965 pages
ISBN:9781450380959
DOI:10.1145/3411763
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 08 May 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Creative Toolkit
  2. Magnet
  3. Online Workshop
  4. Paper
  5. Remote Workshop

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View all
  • (2023)MagneChase: Create Chasing-Capturing Interactions Using Magnetic Potential Barrier for Tangible GamesProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3593900(563-567)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Mixels: Fabricating Interfaces using Programmable Magnetic PixelsProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545698(1-12)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022

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