FireFlies : supporting primary school teachers through open-ended interaction design

Primary school teachers usually perform several tasks simultaneously. Many secondary tasks, such as giving turns or encouraging children to work silently, could be supported by interactive systems, which may lighten the teacher's busy everyday routine. Such systems however, should afford being interacted with while performing another primary task. We call this type of design peripheral interaction design. In this paper we present FireFlies, an open-ended peripheral interaction design developed for primary schools. Preliminary results of a six week deployment of FireFlies in four classrooms, reveal that teachers used FireFlies to perform secondary tasks and saw it as a valuable addition to the classroom. Though different interactions with FireFlies required different levels of effort, teachers could successfully interact with FireFlies during or in between other tasks.