A Method for Promoting Interaction Awareness by Biological Rhythm in Elementary School Children

Recently, in Japan, education about the ability to make decisions as part of a group composed of children with different ways of thinking has become more important. Therefore, discussion activities have been adopted in elementary school education. This study considers a method that supports discussion activities by making children aware of the “state” (i.e., atmosphere, progress) of their group during discussion, and of the ways they are influencing this state themselves. We developed a system which allows us to visualize the entrainment of the biological rhythm to present the group’s state. An experiment using this system was conducted to clarify whether the children were aware of the group state during discussion, and how they were affected by this awareness. We found that this system has the potential to support children when considering ways of participating in the discussion. Also, it was found that the system can act as an interface, encouraging children to think about the importance of their listening to others in the group.