Physical programming: tools for kindergarten children to author physical interactive environments

StoryRooms is a child-centered ubiquitous computing environment (ubicomp) developed for young children to expresses stories. Physical programming is a set of tangible tools and user interaction metaphors for children to control the behaviors of embedded objects in StoryRooms. In this dissertation I describe StoryRooms and physical programming, along with the two studies which showed that kindergarten students had the capacity to understand and use the physical programming approach to control the specialized StoryRooms.