Coding Jam started as a research project in TIDAL lab:

http://tidal.northwestern.edu/blog/strawbies/

Here is a link to a published paper for Strawbies:

http://tidal.northwestern.edu/media/files/pubs/hu-idc-2015.pdf

And here is a link to a great paper that details the history of tangible programming research dating back to the 1960s:

http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/personal-ubicomp.pdf