Introducing the Smart City to Children with a Tangible Interaction Table

Smart Cities come as a solution to the urban challenges faced by the territory. They have grown in popularity in recent years and are now an integral part of the development strategy of many cities. However, this concept remains fuzzy to the larger public whose participation in the smart city is however crucial to its success. To address this issue, an activity has been created to educate children to this concept. The central part of this activity is the construction of a paper-based city model which serves as discussion support for the remaining of the activity. However, the evaluation of the activity revealed that this paper-based support lacks interactivity and does not offer a dynamic and clearly visible response to children's decisions, and therefore provides only limited input to the discussions. We propose to replace the paper city model with a tangible tabletop interface to overcome this problem. This article presents the design of the interface.