Providing a tangible and visual feedback of affective states self-expressions

Abstract

Understanding people’s emotion and affective states in educational environments is relevant given the intrinsic relationship between emotion and learning. In this work, we designed artefacts that use tangible technologies to provide manikins to report the person’s affective states in three dimensions: pleasure, arousal and dominance. In a school environment, the tangible artefacts can joyfully trigger the self-expression of affective states in the students and in the teachers’ practice. In order to raise the school’s awareness about the self-assessment practice of expressing affective states, a joyful data presentation using a LED board was proposed as a visual feedback, which was named SAMLight. The LEDs light up according to the assessment results of the affective states of the students in different classes in the school. To evaluate the system, we carried out sessions with students of eight different classes. The results show that the visual feedback was very illustrative to both students and teachers, leading them to reflect about the subject concerning the classes and school environments.