This systematic literature review examines interactive physical computing methods that promote computational thinking (CT) and enhance student engagement in K-12 education, with a particular focus on non-native English-speaking contexts. An analysis of 67 ACM publications (2015-2025) reveals that robotics and tangible interfaces effectively boost CT skills, motivation, and engagement. Critical gaps identified include inadequate integration of culturally familiar narratives, local languages, and relevant ethical values. Significant disparities exist in geographical representation, participant demographics, and inclusive pedagogies tailored to diverse learners. The review highlights an urgent need for culturally situated designs and practices that actively involve local educational stakeholders. Consequently, this paper proposes a targeted research agenda to develop educational technologies explicitly designed to enhance the experiences of non-native English-speaking learners. This agenda aims to advance inclusive, culturally responsive, and globally applicable interaction design paradigms within the TEI and broader HCI communities.

Tangible technology provides opportunities to design collaborative interactions which allow children to engage in highly collaborative activities. Unfortunately, there are few guidelines on structuring children’s interdependent collaboration with tangible technologies. In this study, we designed and developed a tangible game named MemorINO to “force” children to collaborate. We conducted a classroom study with 23 children and 3 kindergarten teachers. Our investigation revealed two main findings: (1) We could design interactive constraints with tangible technologies to “force” children to attend collaborative activities naturally and interdependently; (2) Tangible environments could help children have good engagements, especially for similar-age group children. Our findings could provide practical guidance on designing tangible interfaces to help children learn to collaborate.

Tangible learning has received increasing attention. However, in the recent decade, it has no comprehensive overview. This study aimed to fill the gap and reviewed 92 publications from all the TEI conference proceedings (2007–2021). We analysed previous studies’ characteristics (e.g., study purpose and interactive modalities) and elaborated on three common topics: collaborative tangible learning, tangibles’ impacts on learning, and comparisons between tangibles and other interfaces. Three key findings were: (1) Tangibles impacted learning because it could scaffold learning, change learning behaviour, and improve learning emotion; (2) We should see the effectiveness of tangibles with rational and critical minds. (3) Some studies emphasised too much on the interaction of tangibles and ignored their metaphor meanings. For future work, we suggest avoiding an intensive cluster on collaboration and children and consider other valuable areas, e.g., tangibles for teachers, tangibles’ social and emotional impacts on students, tangible interaction’s meaning and metaphor.

Creativity is an important part of children’s education. Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) provide new possibilities for creative learning. In this review, we gave an overview of recent studies that supported children’s creative learning using TUIs. Results showed that TUIs had many advantages, such as they (1) were novice-friendly, (2) supported children’s cognitive process and development, (3) promoted their initiatives, (4) enabled them to think outside the box, and (5) encouraged communication and collaboration in an authentic context. Meanwhile, we summarized previous work’s three main limitations: First, most of the studies did not have a long-term experimental verification with sufficient sample size and objective evaluation; Second, some TUI designs lacked a balance of abstractness, openness, richness, and complexity; Finally, the use of TUIs had little consideration of the teacher’s role. Therefore, further research should focus more on the trans-disciplinary nature of TUIs for creative learning and leverage collaboration between human-computer interaction researchers and school teachers.