CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- At FAB26, Amelia Li began with a simple design question: if a child is meant to practice a behavior, why should that behavior sit outside the game? Her proposal, “Breathing as Interaction: Designing Games for Emotional Self-Regulation,” was selected through FAB26’s open call and program curation process for a talk in the Education & Learning track.
FAB26, the 22nd annual International Fab Lab Conference, was organized by the Fab Foundation with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the MIT Museum, Fab Hub Kendall, and the Fab City Foundation. The weeklong Boston program marked the Fab Lab network’s 25th anniversary and included more than 200 talks, workshops, and demonstrations across five tracks. The foundation describes a wider network of about 3,000 Fab Labs in more than 160 countries. Amelia Li’s presentation addressed a narrower, practical question: educational content can be accurate, but does the interaction make clear what the learner is supposed to do?
Her central example was a breathing-game prototype. Breath controls the experience, a character’s path makes the breathing rhythm visible, and a press-and-hold gesture gives the pause between breaths a physical cue. Amelia Li presents it as a design case study rather than a therapeutic product; the prototype has not produced formal child-testing or clinical efficacy data.
Amelia Li works across children’s learning technology, games, museum interactives, and immersive public experiences. After training at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, she worked with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and Schell Games and now works at RLMG. Although the formats vary, much of her work examines how an interface can help people understand the effect of their own actions.
Songqi Sun, a research assistant at City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media whose work includes game-based learning and human-computer interaction, attended Amelia Li’s FAB26 session. “What stayed with me was that breath was not just the subject of the game; it became the input,” Sun said. “I found that genuinely inspiring. It made me think more carefully about how input and game mechanics can work together. In my own design work, I want to explore more ways to use breath, touch, movement, or sound as part of the experience. I think this is especially useful for educational games, because the action itself can help the learner understand what the game is trying to teach.”
In the following interview, Amelia Li discusses what educational gamification often misses, how embodied interaction can make abstract ideas easier to grasp, and why engagement alone is not enough.
1. Why was breathing a useful case study for a broader design problem?
Breathing is simple to name, but it is not necessarily simple for a young child to follow. When an adult says, “inhale, hold, exhale,” the child still has to remember the sequence, understand the timing, perform the action, and stay with it long enough to repeat it. The gap between the instruction and the experience is an interaction-design problem.
If a game explains breathing and then rewards a child for tapping unrelated buttons, the learning goal and the mechanic are still separate. I wanted to see what would happen if the behavior itself became part of how the game worked.
2. You say the intended behavior should become the input. How did that idea shape the prototype?
A microphone listens for breath sounds and converts them into control input. Breathing is not only the subject of the activity; it is how the player moves through it. The character’s path shows the rhythm, while music and visual feedback make the relationship between the breath and the game state easier to follow.
The hold phase needed a different solution. Inhaling and exhaling feel active, but a pause can feel like doing nothing. I translated that pause into a press-and-hold gesture. It does not verify that a child is breathing correctly, but it gives the pause a physical cue that is easier to follow.
The breathing-game prototype turns a guided pattern into a visible path, using character movement and feedback to help players follow each phase. Image courtesy of Amelia Li.
3. Many educational products rely on points, rewards, and animation. What is the difference between engagement and meaningful interaction?
Those tools can be useful, but they do not automatically support learning. Engagement is often treated as a layer added after the educational content is finished—as if keeping someone on the screen is the same as helping them understand.
The more useful question is: what is the learner actually doing while engaged? If the learning goal disappears when you remove the points, the mechanic may be decorating the lesson rather than carrying it. A meaningful interaction should help someone notice a relationship, practice a behavior, make a decision, or understand the consequence of an action. Time spent is not enough on its own.
4. How can this approach extend beyond one game and into museums or other public learning spaces?
I begin with the learning goal rather than the platform: what should someone understand or practice, and what could they do to make that idea easier to perceive? In a science exhibit, that might mean changing one variable and seeing how the system responds. In a social-emotional activity, it might mean rehearsing a behavior instead of only hearing it described.
Museums add space, objects, sound, movement, and other people to the interaction. On an RLMG project connected to Moonshot Museum, I contributed to hardware prototyping, testing, and design iteration for hands-on interactives. It was one part of a larger team effort, and much of the work was practical: build an idea, watch how it behaves, and revise it.
5. What changes when the audience includes different ages, languages, abilities, and levels of prior knowledge?
A public interactive has to communicate quickly. Visitors may enter halfway through, share a control, or use the experience in a way the design team never expected. The hardware also has to work under real environmental and maintenance constraints.
I try to give visitors more than one way to understand what is happening instead of relying on written instructions. Reach, timing, sound, visual hierarchy, and what happens after an unexpected action all affect whether an interface feels usable. Accessibility starts much earlier than a final compliance check; it begins with recognizing that different bodies and minds may encounter the same experience.
6. The breathing prototype does not yet have formal child-testing data. What should be evaluated next?
For me, a design hypothesis and an outcome claim are two different things. The prototype suggests that aligning behavior, input, and feedback may make a breathing sequence easier to understand and more inviting to repeat. It does not show that children will regulate emotion more effectively, and I would not describe it as clinically validated.
The next step is to observe how children actually use it. Can they understand the interaction without a long explanation? Do they follow the intended rhythm? Where do they get confused, and do they want to try again? Age and sensory preference may also change the response. Those questions can evaluate the design. Any educational or therapeutic claim would require a different study and the right subject-matter expertise.
7. Where do you want to take this line of work next?
I want to keep testing it in settings where people learn by doing—games, museums, and other public spaces. Rather than start with a technology or a reward system, I want to start with the idea or behavior people need to understand and prototype the interaction around that. I also think it is useful to share the less successful iterations, because they often explain the method more clearly than a polished final result.
Over time, I hope this can give design teams a practical way to judge whether a mechanic supports the learning goal or simply keeps someone occupied. Not every lesson needs to become a game. But when the action, feedback, and intended lesson reinforce one another, interaction design is doing more than holding attention.
The breathing game remains a prototype, but the question behind it extends beyond this one example: what changes when the action required by an interface also carries the lesson? For Amelia Li, that question has to be tested through prototypes, observation, and iteration rather than answered by engagement metrics alone.
Published by: Jose Villarreal
