I-PE: intelligent Play Environements to stimulate social and physical activities

The Intelligent Play Environments project (I-PE) was a project (2010 - 2014)funded by FES (Ministry of Economic Affairs) which aims to create playful solutions that stimulate primary school students to be more physically active. The main goal of the project is to explore whether and how children can be activated to social and physical play by embedding gaming concepts into physical concepts. The overall project objective is addressed in two research activities:

1. Develop intelligent play environments providing a playful persuasion experience - How to design playful persuasive experiences that lead to social and physical activities?
2. Develop an intelligent decentralized platform activity - How can intelligent technologies contribute to an adaptive and flexible playful solution?

The TU Delft worked on the development of an interactive app to assess and evaluate the playful experiences.

The main goal of the project is to explore whether and how children can be activated to social and physical play by embedding gaming concepts into physical concepts.

The project examined how to design and evaluate interactive play experiences. Diverse designs were created, varying the age of user group (younger and older children) and supporting different forms of play (social, physical and fantasy play). The design process included interaction with diverse stakeholders, such as children, companies, PE teachers and educational experts.

The outcome includes interactive prototypes, such as the GlowSteps (an iteractive tile-based play platform for social and physical play), Wobble (an iteractive environment consistsing of multiple interactive objects in the shape of balls on a flexible stem to support fantsay play of young children) and Lucio (donut shaped interactive objects to support physical and social play in a PE class environment intended for younger and older children).