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One of the current limitations in digital educational experiences is the lack of touch. Touch is a critical component in the learning process and in creating inclusive educational experiences for sensorially diverse learners. From haptic devices to tangible user interfaces (TUI), a growing body of research is investigating ways to bring touch back into the digital world, yet many focus on a specific dimension (e.g. haptic feedback or kinesthetic manipulation) of touch. Learning, however, is a multi-dimensional touch experience - it is about moving and being moved. This work presents the Action Quad - a novel haptic-TUI design for teaching geometry (specifically quadrilaterals). The Action Quad is a multi-point-of-contact, reconfigurable tool that synergizes the affordances of both kinesthetic interaction and haptic feedback into a single form factor. We present findings from an initial user study (N=11) investigating how sighted- hearing individuals approach, interact, and experience the Action Quad, and we present a case study with an individual with blindness. We share key takeaways from the design process and participant feedback on interactions with this novel haptic-TUI device, sharing design insights on an emerging area of research that could support a new class of educational learning tools rooted in touch. 

Touch is often omitted or viewed as unnecessary in digital learning. Lack of touch feedback limits the accessibility and multimodal capacity of digital educational content. Touchscreens with vibratory, haptic feedback are prevalent, yet this kind of feedback is often under-utilized. This work provides initial investigations into the design, development, and use of vibratory feedback within multimodal, interactive, educational simulations on touchscreen devices by learners with and without visual impairments. The objective of this work is to design and evaluate different haptic paradigms that could support interaction and learning in educational simulations. We investigated the implementation of four haptic paradigms in two physics simulations. Interviews were conducted with eight learners (five sighted learners; three learners with visual impairments) on one simulation and initial results are shared. We discuss the learner outcomes of each paradigm and how they impact design and development moving forward.