What a fantastic and inspirational event! Thanks to funding from Microsoft, Tom and Duncan were able to design and implement a Multi-Touch version of ItzaBitza’s Home Sweet Home play set for Windows 7’s cool Multi-Touch capabilities.

Designing interaction with Multi Touch in mind is far different than designing for a mouse’s point and click interface. In the mouse version of ItzaBitza, the child draws a cloud with a mouse and then holds down the left mouse button so that rain comes out of the cloud. In the Multi-Touch version, the child uses their finger to draw a cloud, and then squeezes the cloud – as they might a virtual sponge – to get the rain out.

The characters and anything drawn with Living Ink can be made really, really big or really, really small by using two fingers to stretch them. The results are hilarious. I spent two days playing with Multi-Touch ItzaBitza Home Sweet Home play set as I talked with many enthusiastic and inspiring teachers. One man was planning to use Kodu (Microsoft’s kids programming language) within an activity for his high school students since he loves programming. Involving his students in game programming using Kodo is just something above and beyond he has to do yet he wants to share the joy and power he feels when he’s creating software.

It blows me away to think how Kids drawing games can take on a whole new personality! Now kids can have a wonderful time finger painting and exploring virtual objects without us adults having a very messy cleanup job! Kids playing reading games like ItzaBitza and ItzaZoo on touch devices can poke at words and let the words speak for themselves!

There were tons of goodies that I got excited about while walking the exhibit floor.  My favorite was SMART Technology’s  SMART Table interactive learning center.  I got to thinking that we could really change the behavior of how our early readers learn to read through experiences like a collaborative multi-touch version of ItzaBitza!