Designing the Sonic Blocks

This work gives an account of the design, development and deployment of the Sonic Blocks, with a small group of children in a primary school. The work gained an understanding of the blocks unique capabilities to enable physical and embodied interaction for exploratory and expressive sound making purposes. The findings include a comparison to conventional music making software on a personal computer and insights into the ability of the Sonic Blocks to mediate a collaborative music making activity with children. This work also gives a rigorous account of the design process used to create the Sonic Blocks, framed through a review of contemporary literature in the fields of tangible interaction, interaction design, perceptual psychology and constructivist learning. This work will be useful for researchers and students of Human Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Ubiquitous Computing, Tangible and Physical Interaction and Learning with Technologies.