Experience Design for Kids: Phygital Product for Augmented Pedagogy

The paper aims to highlight the active role that some tools have assumed within the playful activity of today’s children. It is intended to underline, how the connection of the digital world with the world of toys allows to expand the games from traditional ways to create new possibilities of play and active learning for an augmented pedagogy.


Introduction
One of the major differences between today's children's play and that of the past is the strong presence of tools to facilitate or influence the action of the game. Obviously, children have always played as far as they could, yet the ways, the gestures, the objects of their games have always been related to their culture and social conditions. But nowadays the awareness of the status of the game as a dynamic process, as a key facilitator for learning, and the fact that it reflects the social and cultural contexts in which children live, is more alive and shared in adults [1][2][3]. The game has been investigated for centuries focusing on its interesting reflections, sometimes even ambivalent concerns and feelings, coming from the religious and secular-bourgeois world [4]. The different theories in psychology and sociology agree in affirming that playful activity is fundamental for children: it is in fact necessary to learn to live daily experiences, for cognitive growth, to build skills, to socialize, for emotional development and physical and also to master emotional trauma [5].
Looking at Social Learning Theory, which has its main thinker in Jean Piaget [6,7], identity would be modeled based on social stimulus. Huizinga [8] states that it is culture itself that arises in a playful form "[...] every human action appears as a game. (…) I am more and more firmly convinced that human civilization arises and develops in the game ", that is, it is represented in playful forms and moods. The renewal carried out in the twentieth century, defined as the "century of children" [9] begins with the theories of the Swedish writer for a new idea of "motherhood" and "fatherhood" which focuses on infantile needs. It then continues with the educational transformations from school and activist pedagogy that gives voice and space to educational models based on the primacy of 'doing'.
These positions leave significant traces in the current pedagogical reflection as a peculiar activity of the child, functional to the construction of the personality, which as such must be guaranteed in order to learn "playing the profession of man" [4].
It is significant now to highlight the increasingly active role that some shared knowledge has assumed within the playful activity of today's children, after the educational transformations coming to the fore in the eyes of pedagogists and parents in the last century from school and activist pedagogy. This awareness shared today is reflected in the design of the game tools, in which the real end user, dren has opened to the new potential offered by technology and digital innovation to respond to increasingly specific and constantly evolving needs. Today the design activity is oriented towards the Product Service System (PSS), that is, with an integrated mixture of products, communication strategies, services and spaces to offer innovative solutions.

Product Service System Design (PSSD) for Kids
Let's see how the 'design for kids' sector is moving towards the User Centered Design logic [10]. The connection between the digital world and the world of toys allows you to expand games from traditional ways and thus create new possibilities for play and learning. Access to children's devices and electronic tools occurs at an ever-lower age. Digitization is a very important goal for many toy companies. Online games and apps are constantly increasing, which bridge the gap between the virtual and real world, in a very special way [11]. The most spoken language in the world is not English, but the 'code': Microsoft's Satya Nadella, defines it as 'poetry'.
To teach it to children, the growing market trend is that of developing STEM toys (an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in those forms in which the active role of the child is fundamental.
The development of technology, of new devices with which to communicate and interact, has given birth to a new era for "digital natives" [12]. They are the first generation that grew up with new technologies: they are those who prefer to process images or videos, rather than written texts. Faced with this evidence, the ways of learning must and are evolving. In this sense, the PSS Design approach incorporates innovative strategies that shift businesses away from simply designing and selling physical products to developing integrated systems of products and services that satisfy human needs. It has also been observed that time spent with the technological tool is rarely productive or educational. Children should know the mechanisms and logic behind evolving technologies, as well as the basic functioning of the most common devices; they need to understand and exploit the potential of digital in the field of communication and innovation, but also in terms of collaboration and social inclusion. Children should learn how to develop a critical approach towards the reliability of media, information and available data and be aware of the ethical and legal principles that derive from the use of these tools. It is essential to promote an active approach to technology by the implementation of creative processes and design paths, overcoming the simple instrumental use. It is here that gaming can become a fundamental opportunity through which transmit some of these skills using an active approach.

Digital in Support of a New Type of Learning
About this John Dewey [15] underlines the difference between play as an activity and playfulness as an attitude; playfulness can also be present in situations that are not perceived as a game. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines this mental state of complete absorption as flow [16]. Csikszentmihalyi also argues that in the ideational process a fundamental role can be played by the surrounding environment. The creative surroundings [16] are those places whose conditions can facilitate the creative act, conditions that can also be determined by the grouping of people who share the same interests and passions, and which generate a stimulating atmosphere useful for the circulation of ideas.
The importance of the environment in the ideational and learning process has been repeated many times also by great personalities of the educational field, starting from Maria Montessori's [17] definition of a 'ambiente maestro' a space in which the child can The designer must also work on overlapping of various languages (coding, manual writing, musical language, drawing, etc.) as well as different thematic areas (humanistic and scientific) and mixing analogical and digital spheres. By synthesizing multiple elements from different dimensions, the child is offered the opportunity to create new connections, to approach art and recognize beauty, while learning to move in open systems where there is not just a single correct answer. The future-claims [19] will belong to those who manage to redefine and rethink the complex relationship between natural and artificial; who will be able to combine knowledge and skills; who will merge the two cultures (humanistic and scientific) both in terms of education and training, but also the definition of professional profiles and skills [19].
It is generally possible to classify the use of technology applied to toys as follows: AI (Artificial Intelligence), that is, toys with special features such as visual perception, voice recognition, translation, etc.; Machine Learning, that is, toys that can learn, behave according to patterns, change their actions according to stimuli and adapt to the player's ability; Internet of Toys (IoToys), that is, toys connected wirelessly to the Internet, to other toys and/or to database data; Virtual Reality, that is, toys with computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional image or of an environment with which one can interact in real-time or physically by using special electronic equipment (helmet, glasses, gloves, etc.); Augmented Reality through the use of a smartphone or tablet's camera which provides a level of information, including text and/or images, that goes beyond the real world's vision [20].
The ability to design and develop 'spaces for learning and play' that are careful to balance and make dialogue between the dimensions of analogue and digital, natural and artificial, humanistic and scientific culture, with innovative content it has become a neces-sary skill to be solicited in all those realities that deal with education and development of gaming products for children.

Literature review
In order to map the state of the art of the knowledge in this field, a literature review was carried out to identify the main needs

Ethnography research
Subsequently, 2 focus groups were carried out which involved parents and teachers (20 people in total) to investigate and limit the problems encountered, and 2 workshops with children aged

Am J Biomed Sci & Res
Copy@ Benedetta Terenzi

Conclusions
Technology offers interesting opportunities but is often not considered as a medium or intermediary of qualified and targeted content, capable of creating new opportunities for play, learning and socialization. A self-referencing mode is almost always used as bait and is not projected towards the user. At the same time, today if we think about design for kids it is easy to understand the number and type of skills required to design a quality product, whatever it is [20]. The fundamental approach that qualifies designers in the development of new Phygital products in the service of an augmented pedagogy must therefore start from these considerations: I. ICT has great potential for enhancing teaching and learning outcomes, but the realization of this potential depends much on how the teacher uses the technology. Possible barrier for the diffusion of this new Phygital products: accessibility. Constraints such as (a) lack of enough money, interests among educators, and administrators, lack of enough software, lack of political will all these factors will invariably affect the accessibility of ICT to the education sectors.