Abstract

This paper discusses PlayDT, a general framework aimed at supporting transposition of abstract knowledge involving temporal aspects and from different domains, into playful interactions, so to provide grounding to conceptual learning. The notion of transposition has been investigated in two previous research projects, MicroCulture and Prime Slaughter, focusing respectively on historical processes and prime factorization. In order to lift the notion of transposition towards a general framework, a new inquiry has been conducted, called Fourier Fury, aimed at exploring playful transpositions of the Fourier Transform. All three projects have been conducted in a participatory design fashion; while the first two helped defining the phases of the PlayDT framework, the last study applied and further extended its applicability, showing how a collection of mini-games can be used to transpose parts of a large and complex source domain. Future work involves prototyping of the Fourier Fury game and further testing.