Exploring children’s embodied interactions through digitally facilitated enactment: A case study when math education MOVES

Technology-enhanced embodied learning has gained traction in HCI, yet deeper insights into how children’s physical actions interplay with their cognitive and emotional states remain underexplored. This study investigates MOVES-NL, an embodied digital learning environment, as a medium for advancing understanding of the dynamic relationship between movement, engagement, and cognitive processes such as stress and learning. MOVES-NL combines movement and immediate formative feedback to foster arithmetic understanding of integers, offering a novel perspective on the integration between embodied interactions and conceptual development. Moving beyond traditional evaluations of learning impact or media comparisons, this work employs multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) integrating motion capture with physiological data to explore the nuanced dynamics of embodied learning. Through a mixed-methods approach integrating both qualitative and quantitative analyses, this study reveals how students’ physical movements relate to cognitive and emotional states, offering actionable insights to support engagement and learning processes. This research advances the understanding of how children’s physical movements relate to their cognitive processes and highlights key considerations for integrating embodied technologies into curricula to foster student engagement and deepen their conceptual understanding, adding value to ongoing conversations about the role of digital technology in children’s education and development. • Bridging embodied learning design to children’s cognitive, emotional, behavior. • Designing MOVES-NL, an interactive tool with embodied activities for integer learning. • Detailing embodied math learning via case analyses of three individual learners. • Leveraging physiological data to explore links between movement and learning. • Offering insights to design strategies and tools for embodied math learning.