Curriculum
With Yujia, I co-designed the full curriculum: how concepts are introduced, explored, connected, and applied.
CMU HCII · Interactive Structures LabSubmitted to CHI 2027
Feel2Know
From feeling a difference
to understanding why.
A guided learning experience that brings soft and compliant mechanisms off the screen—and into people’s hands.
My contribution
Designing the learning,
not just the interface.
Learning boards
I designed the final learning boards—the iPad screens that guide learners through the activities.
Study analysis
With Yujia, I analyzed the user-study data to understand learning outcomes and how participants approached the tasks.
Team context: Feel2Know combines physical structures and a digital curriculum. The 3D blocks were designed by other team members, not by me.
The design question
Touch makes it tangible.
What makes it learning?
Bending a flexible object reveals resistance and motion immediately. But that sensation alone does not explain which geometric or material property caused it.
Our challenge was to connect physical exploration to a repeatable reasoning process, rather than leave learners with an interesting demonstration.
20 interactive screens · Three concepts
One learning rhythm,
across different mechanisms.
Bending stiffness, degrees of freedom, and material behavior each follow the same four-stage cycle. Here is how it unfolds in the bending-stiffness module.
Define→Explore→Generalize→Apply
Define
Give the sensation a name.
Introduce bending stiffness through familiar examples and a short classification task, establishing vocabulary before physical exploration.
Explore
Feel a difference. Make a prediction.
Compare hinges that vary in width, thickness, or length while other variables stay fixed. Learners connect what they feel to a graph, then reconsider their answer with feedback.
Generalize
Turn an observation into a principle.
Bring physical comparisons back to a visual and mathematical explanation: thickness and length affect stiffness differently from width.
Apply
Build, test, and revise.
Choose and stack five blocks, thread a cord, and pull to test a target bending sequence. Feedback identifies what needs to change without giving away the exact block to use.
Learning-board and activity figures from the submitted manuscript. Feedback combines guided explanations and hints; construction-task correctness was marked by a researcher, not automatically sensed.
Refining the experience
Small changes to the boards.
Clearer thinking in the activity.
Concept before complexity.
The curriculum introduced degrees of freedom before range of motion, separating what movement is possible from how far something can move.
Commit before the answer.
Moving feedback behind a submit action gave learners a moment to make their own judgment before seeing the response.
Make the final task connect.
Iterations tightened the relationship between earlier comparisons and the final construction challenge, asking learners to use a principle in a new configuration.
Evaluating the curriculum
The same lesson.
Two ways to experience it.
Thirty adults were randomly assigned to tangible or interactive-simulation conditions, with 15 in each. Both used the same 20-screen curriculum, learning goals, questions, narration, and feedback.
Mean test score · Out of 10
Both groups learned.
The tangible group gained more.
A 10-item pre/post assessment showed a larger improvement in the tangible condition (group × time interaction, p = .027).
Pre-testPost-test
Tangible
+4.13 pointsSimulation
+2.87 pointsFewer task attempts
Tangible participants completed all four application tasks with fewer attempts, suggesting a more direct path from exploration to revision.
Resistance as evidence
10 of 15 tangible participants described using physical resistance or movement limits to reason about the mechanisms.
Touch still needs context
6 of 15 tangible participants said touch alone was not enough. Diagrams and equations remained important to understanding.
Design takeaway
The screen should help people
notice what their hands discover.
For me, the central design work was connecting an action to a question, a question to an explanation, and an explanation to the next attempt. Physical, visual, and symbolic representations work best as complements—not replacements.
Research source: Feel2Know: Learning Soft and Compliant Mechanisms Through Tangible Interaction, submitted to CHI 2027. Process details are drawn from the team’s project documentation.
Explore all work ↗