Internet of things devices are already part of primary school children's living but their design or fabrication is often not part of their school education. Italian primary schools, in particular, bring their own restraints to the integration of their design. This paper explores how to bring the design of IoT tangibles to primary-school children and their educators. It narrates a workshop experience with a primary school class. This was on purpose conducted in an environment similar to their school, without typical fablab facilities. It was linked to the curriculum of the class: it asked children to create IoT tangibles related to socio-emotional learning. The workshop organised the fabrication in stages. Initially, it used paper-based generative toolkigs, which would make everybody feel on equal footing (children and teachers alike): Tiles-like cards and a conceptualisation framework. Then it progressively moved children into programming their own IoT tangibles for socio-emotional goals. The workshop gathered mixed data, mainly qualitative. The paper ends by reflecting on them and the entire experience.

Primary school curricula teach children conversation norms for promoting positive social interactions, such as turn-taking and turn reserving, while curricula discourage other aspects of conversations, such as overlapping in turns. However such norms are abstract and difficult to master. Recently, interactive tangible solutions (briefly, tangibles) have been used to sustain the scaffolding of conversation norms. This paper continues this line of investigation. It discusses how meta-design and action research complement each other and tackle trade-offs in designing tangibles for conversations in primary schools. It reports on the emergence and genesis of tangibles for class conversation, named ClassTalk. Then it focusses on usages and actions with ClassTalk in 2018 in primary school classes, and it discusses them in relation to children's and teachers' engagement and usages of tangibles. It concludes by reflecting on the entire experience, and considers trade-offs and lessons learnt for meta-design and action research, as well as for the design of such tangibles per se.

The understanding of linguistic messages can be made extremely complex by the simultaneous presence of interfering sounds, especially when they are also linguistic in nature. In two experiments, we tested if visual cues directing attention to spatial or temporal components of speech in noise can improve its identification. The hearing-in-noise task required identification of a five-digit sequence (target) embedded in a stream of time-reversed speech. Using a custom-built device located in front of the participant, we delivered visual cues to orient attention to the location of target sounds and/or their temporal window. In Exp. 1 ( ), we validated this visual-to-auditory cueing method in normal-hearing listeners, tested under typical binaural listening conditions. In Exp. 2 ( ), we assessed the efficacy of the same visual cues in normal-hearing listeners wearing a monaural ear plug, to study the effects of simulated monaural and conductive hearing loss on visual-to-auditory attention orienting. While Exp. 1 revealed a benefit of both spatial and temporal visual cues for hearing in noise, Exp. 2 showed that only the temporal visual cues remained effective during monaural listening. These findings indicate that when the acoustic experience is altered, visual-to-auditory attention orienting is more robust for temporal compared to spatial attributes of the auditory stimuli. These findings have implications for the relation between spatial and temporal attributes of sound objects, and when planning devices to orient audiovisual attention for subjects suffering from hearing loss.