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material science and digital fabrication to create shape-changing and dynamic interfaces. In this workshop, participants will investigate ways in whichMMtools can effectively support building STEM learning toolkits for novice learners from diverse backgrounds. Participants will engage in hands-on activities designing and simulating water-triggered morphing artifacts using a software design tool and fabricating them with low-cost materials. This workshop aims to collectively explore creative opportunities and barriers o introducing emerging STEM concepts and skills to novice learners. We hope to ideate frameworks for designing educational toolkits which leverage the accessible nature of morphing beads, democratizing a process that would typically require advanced material synthesis and specialized lab settings. Designers, educators, learning scientists, and researchers are welcome to join us in brainstorming ways to develop toolkits to support creative exploration in education with MM. 

Hydrogels are versatile morphing materials that have recently been adopted for creating shape-changing interfaces. However, most shape-changing interfaces require advanced material synthesis, specialized lab settings for fabrication, and technical knowledge is needed to simulate their morphing behavior. To replicate such structures, these factors become a barrier for makers. Therefore, to democratize the creation of hydrogel-based morphing artifacts and to extend their design space in HCI, we propose a water-triggered morphing mechanism that utilizes the distance between adjacent hydrogel beads adhered on a thin substrate to control their bending angle. This paper describes the bending angle quantification experiments for creating a simulator, the process of developing a computational tool along with its user-friendly workflow and demonstrates kirigami and branch-based artifacts built with the tool. Using our method, anyone can easily design and fabricate custom morphing structures.