{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,13]],"date-time":"2026-04-13T12:35:09Z","timestamp":1776083709057,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":48,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,9,5]],"date-time":"2018-09-05T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1536105600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["MTI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Tangible technologies are considered promising tools for learning, by enabling multimodal interaction through physical action and manipulation of physical and digital elements, thus facilitating representational concrete\u2013abstract links. A key concept in a tangible system is that its physical components are objects of interest, with associated meanings relevant to the context. Tangible technologies are said to provide \u2018natural\u2019 mappings that employ spatial analogies and adhere to cultural standards, capitalising on people\u2019s familiarity with the physical world. Students with intellectual disabilities particularly benefit from interaction with tangibles, given their difficulties with perception and abstraction. However, symbolic information does not always have an obvious physical equivalent, and meanings do not reside in the representations used in the artefacts themselves, but in the ways they are manipulated and interpreted. In educational contexts, meaning attached to artefacts by designers is not necessarily transparent to students, nor interpreted by them as the designer predicted. Using artefacts and understanding their significance is of utmost importance for the construction of knowledge within the learning process; hence the need to study the use of the artefacts in contexts of practice and how they are transformed by the students. This article discusses how children with intellectual disabilities conceptually interpreted the elements of four tangible artefacts, and which characteristics of these tangibles were key for productive, multimodal interaction, thus potentially guiding designers and educators. Analysis shows the importance of designing physical-digital semantic mappings that capitalise on conceptual metaphors related to children\u2019s familiar contexts, rather than using more abstract representations. Such metaphorical connections, preferably building on physical properties, contribute to children\u2019s comprehension and facilitate their exploration of the systems.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/mti2030054","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,9,6]],"date-time":"2018-09-06T02:55:07Z","timestamp":1536202507000},"page":"54","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Tangible Representational Properties: Implications for Meaning Making"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"2","author":[{"given":"Taciana","family":"Pontual Falc\u00e3o","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Education, University College London Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK"},{"name":"Departamento de Computa\u00e7\u00e3o, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Rua Dom Manuel de Medeiros s\/n, Recife-PE, CEP: 52171-900, Brazil"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,9,5]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dourish, P. 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