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[EN] Although a myriad of educational applications using tablets and multi-touch technology for kindergarten children have been developed in the last decade, most of these applications do not fully exploit multi-touch technology since the game world used is limited to the screen only. Considering a larger digital space in tablet-based educational scenarios would be beneficial since it would enable the design of engaging activities driven by curiosity, exploration, discovery and decisions on where the next action is situated in the digital virtual space by directional awareness. This paper therefore investigates kindergarten children's abilities to use a virtual world beyond the screen and evaluates three different types of visual prompts for communicating directional awareness. The results obtained show, firstly, that these specific users are able to use the space beyond the screen boundaries and that the evaluated prompts can effectively communicate information to kindergarten children. The paper also makes a set of recommendations to help designers choose the appropriate type of prompt for their application requirements., This work received financial support from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and was funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) in the project TIN2014-60077-R (SUPEREMOS). This work is also supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship within the FPU program from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports to V. Nacher (FPU14/00136) and from GVA (ACIF/2014/214) to F. Garcia-Sanjuan.

[EN] Gamification has been identified as an interesting technique to foster collaboration in educational contexts. However, there are not many approaches that tackle this in primary school learning environments. The most popular technologies in the classroom are still traditional video consoles and desktop computers, which complicate the design of collaborative activities since they are essentially mono-user. The recent popularization of handheld devices such as tablets and smartphones has made it possible to build affordable, scalable, and improvised collaborative gamifled activities by creating a multi-tablet environment. In this paper we present Quizbot, a collaborative gamifled quiz application to practice different subjects, which can be defined by educators beforehand. Two versions of the system are implemented: a tactile for tablets laid on a table, in which all the elements are digital; and a tangible in which the tablets are scattered on the floor and the components are both digital and physical objects. Both versions of Quizbot are evaluated and compared in a study with eighty primary-schooled children in terms of user experience and quality of collaboration supported. Results indicate that both versions of Quizbot are essentially equally fun and easy to use, and can effectively support collaboration, with the tangible version outperforming the other one with respect to make the children reach consensus after a discussion, split and parallelize work, and treat each other with more respect, but also presenting a poorer time management., We would like to thank Universitat Politecnica de Valencia's Summer School for their collaboration during the development of this study, as well as Colegio Internacional Ausias March for their support in the development of educational content., This work is supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R. It is also supported by fellowship ACIF/2014/214 within the VALi+d program from Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana), and by fellowship FPU14/00136 within the FPU program from Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport

Interaction with handheld devices is usually limited to multi-touch input in the small display area and does not consider the space above and around the surfaces. In this paper we present and evaluate a way of exploiting this 3D space by enabling precise mid-air interactions using fiducial markers to create multi-display educational games that foster collaboration and physical mobility. Our evaluation determines that sixty children aged 6 to 12 years can effectively perform precise mid-air manipulations with these markers and reports their positive impressions of this type of interaction.

Long-term hospitalization or paying frequent visits to a hospital can be a stressful experience for children. The lack of conversation partners can worsen the physical symptoms of their disease and cause feelings of loneliness or isolation. Although many technological efforts have been made to improve the wellbeing of children in hospital, they either underuse interaction, disregard co-located communication, or push it into the background. In this paper we present two ongoing case studies from a local hospital in which patients present special requirements regarding mobility and socialization, describe two activities based on tablet devices to collaboratively control physical and virtual artifacts, and discuss the different types of communication that these activities can enable.

This work introduces a Multi-Display Environment (MDE) based on handheld devices to build tabletop-like experiences in an affordable, scalable, and simple way to foster collaboration in educational settings.

This paper evaluates MarkAirs, an interaction technique that uses fiducial markers to perform mid-air interactions. MarkAirs offers several advantages: the proposed technique does not require any tracking external hardware other than the front camera of a mobile device; it is robust even when the markers are partially occluded; and it enables precise 2D manipulations (translation, rotation and scaling). An evaluation study points to the feasibility and precision of the proposed technique and the perceived usability and subjective workload impressions of the participants.