It is well known that primary school children may face difficulties in acquiring mathematical competence, possibly because teaching is generally based on formal lessons with little opportunity to exploit more multisensory-based activities within the classroom. To overcome such difficulties, we report here the exemplary design of a novel multisensory learning environment for teaching mathematical concepts based on meaningful inputs from elementary school teachers. First, we developed and administered a questionnaire to 101 teachers asking them to rate based on their experience the learning difficulty for specific arithmetical and geometrical concepts encountered by elementary school children. Additionally, the questionnaire investigated the feasibility to use multisensory information to teach mathematical concepts. Results show that challenging concepts differ depending on children school level, thus providing a guidance to improve teaching strategies and the design of new and emerging learning technologies accordingly. Second, we obtained specific and practical design inputs with workshops involving elementary school teachers and children. Altogether, these findings are used to inform the design of emerging multimodal technological applications, that take advantage not only of vision but also of other sensory modalities. In the present work, we describe in detail one exemplary multisensory environment design based on the questionnaire results and design ideas from the workshops: the Space Shapes game, which exploits visual and haptic/proprioceptive sensory information to support mental rotation, 2D–3D transformation and percentages. Corroborating research evidence in neuroscience and pedagogy, our work presents a functional approach to develop novel multimodal user interfaces to improve education in the classroom.

众所周知，小学生在获得数学能力方面可能面临困难，可能是因为教学通常基于正规课程，很少有机会在课堂上开展更多基于多感官的活动。为了克服这些困难，我们在这里报告了一种新颖的多感官学习环境的示范设计，用于基于小学教师有意义的输入来教授数学概念。首先，我们向 101 名教师制定并实施了一份调查问卷，要求他们根据自己的经验对小学生遇到的特定算术和几何概念的学习难度进行评分。此外，调查问卷还调查了使用多感官信息教授数学概念的可行性。结果表明，具有挑战性的概念因儿童学校水平的不同而不同，从而为相应改进教学策略和新兴学习技术的设计提供了指导。其次，我们通过小学教师和儿童参与的研讨会获得了具体且实用的设计投入。总而言之，这些发现用于为新兴多模式技术应用的设计提供信息，这些应用不仅利用视觉，还利用其他感官模式。在目前的工作中，我们根据研讨会的问卷结果和设计思想详细描述了一种示例性的多感官环境设计：空间形状游戏，它利用视觉和触觉/本体感觉信息来支持心理旋转、2D-3D 转换和百分比。我们的工作证实了神经科学和教育学的研究证据，提出了一种开发新颖的多模式用户界面以改善课堂教育的功能方法。