Intro to haptic communications for high school students

Most haptic educational papers focus on using haptic devices as an aid to teaching. We introduced the use of vibro-tactile communication as well as tactile and kinesthetic sensing and their combination to high school students in order to introduce them to the field of haptics and its applications. The effectiveness of our approach for introducing the concepts as well as the technical issues associated with haptics to this age group was relatively successful. Initially, various physiological response properties of the human tactile system, including the kinesthetic component as well as the tactual (force, texture) properties were presented. The students were then exposed to theory, hardware (sensors, actuators) interfacing as well as the software to close the loop between sensing and haptic feedback after initially investigating open loop configurations. Vibro-tactile (i.e., pager motors) were used in the labs as chiefly communication devices to convey either pan-tilt from an accelerometer (kinesthetic) or the intensity of force exerted on a force pressure sensor. The students enjoyed the experience, especially the hands-on nature of the project and their only major complaint was that there was too much programming. Our future intent is to abstract the building blocks, simplify the software interfacing so as to allow students of various levels and capabilities to effectively be creative and imaginative in developing various haptic communication applications and tools