Search

This paper describes a tabletop prototype that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer to manipulative learning. After analyzing children's cognitive and psychomotorial skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on observations of the children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment with the prototype.

While standard icons often exist for common tasks, it can be difficult to design meaningful icons for non-standard tasks. Following a desire to build a music application that does not rely on text-based instructions, this paper explores suitable iconic representations for a 'record music' function on a mobile device. A study was carried out with primary school children (aged 8--10) to explore their current understanding of icons and elicit their requirements. It was seen that they were familiar with common icons, but that audio recording remains a difficult concept to represent through icons alone.

This paper investigates the use of drawings as a tool for the evaluation of children's interfaces. In the study, children's experiences on a variety of computer interfaces were captured in drawings. A group of four researchers participated in the coding of the drawings, before the results were aggregated and statistically analysed.The evaluation of the approach is positive: the chosen drawing method could be used easily and was effective in conveying the user experience from the drawings; a number of the drawings conveyed information pertaining to user experiences: fun (F), goal fit (GF) and tangible magic (TM); the method was found generally reliable at capturing all three elements and particularly reliable at capturing fun.

This paper introduces a new design method - Warp Speed Design - for use with older children (aged 9+) for the design of workable tangible games. The rationale for the method is presented and then a workshop, in which the method was evaluated, is described. The method introduced children to basic programming concepts and worked surprisingly well. Almost all of the designs made by the children were so well specifies at the end of the brief workshop that they were able to be developed with very little uncertainty.

Paula Kotze, William Wong, Joaquim Jorge, Alan Dix and Paula Alexandra Silva 1 Meraka Institute, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, and School of Computing, University of South Africa, P O Box 395, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa Paula.Kotze@meraka.org.za WWW home page: http://www.meraka.org.za Interaction Design Centre 2 School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London NW4 4BT UK. w.wong@mdx.ac.uk WWW home page: http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/idc 3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Technical University of Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais s/n, Lisboa 1049-001, Portugal jorgej@ist.utl.pt WWW home page: http://web.ist.utl.pt/jorgej 4 Computing Department, InfoLab21, South Drive Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK alan@hcibook.com WWW home page: http://www.hcibook.com/alan/ 5 Departamento de Matematica e Engenharias, Universidade da Madeira Campus Universitario da Penteada, 9000-390 Funchal, Portugal palexa@gmail.com WWW home page: http://dme.uma.pt/pt/people/faculty/Paula.Alexandra.Silva.html

This chapter discusses the changing landscape of mobile technologies with the ways in which design processes are critical for the future and what children could learn using tomorrow's new mobile technologies. Mobile technologies are also agents for change. Some changes might lead to good outcomes when used in developing countries, and some might not. There are many different types of mobile technologies today, and also a diversity of approaches to design. However, where change might be most obvious is in the learning and use chapters. In addition, social learning experiences can be better explored with a mobile platform. For example, when authors discuss the impact on parents, grandparents, and even dispersed families, mobile technologies can lead to a path for change. These changes will be determined by a variety of industry professionals, academic researchers, government and nonprofit policymakers, and, hopefully in collaboration with users, children. Designers, suppliers, educators, computer scientists, information professionals, artists, engineers, and many more can be a part of designing this future for mobile technologies. Three areas for mobile technologies' growth and change in the future can be easily seen: bridging differences in culture and age; developing communities of children; and empowering the voices of young people. The chapter discusses considerations for the general process of designing future mobile technologies for different purposes: for learning, for communication and connection, and for play.

Taking computer technology away from the desktop and into a more physical, manipulative space, is known that provide many benefits and is generally considered to result in a system that is easier to learn and more natural to use. This paper describes a design solution that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer for manipulative learning. After analysis of children's cognitive and psychomotor skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game that is suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on the observation of children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment of the prototype.

The use of heuristics for the evaluation of interfaces is a well studied area. Currently there appear to be two main research areas in relation to heuristics: the analysis of methods to improve the effectiveness of heuristic evaluations; and the development of new heuristic sets for novel and specialised domains. This paper proposes an evidence based design approach to the development of domain specific heuristics and shows how this method was applied within the context of computer assisted assessment. A corpus of usability problems was created through a series of student surveys, heuristic evaluations, and a review of the literature. This corpus was then used to synthesise a set of domain specific heuristics for evaluating CAA applications. The paper describes the process, and presents a new set of heuristics for evaluating CAA applications.

This paper describes Jabberwocky, a digital ink based story writing and reading application for children. Created following an immersive design experience, the Jabberwocky interface, and its underlying algorithms, are motivated and described in the paper.Jabberwocky is novel on several counts; it provides a humorous and fun filled interface to shield users from the ambiguity of its underlying recognition based systems, it allows for the setting of user parameters to respect the different tolerance levels of children, and it features a 'won't work for you' interface to protect children who are not yet able to gain advantage from its use.

This paper describes a small study of children's drawings in the context of tangible interaction. The study was intended to discover what children could draw that would indicate what they understood about tangible interactions. Two different tangible interfaces were considered, and for each of these, a different reporting format was used. The children's drawings were coded by three researchers and the results aggregated. The study shows that the coding method chosen was effective in conveying the information from the diagrams. The different reporting methods were similar but there was some evidence that one reporting format seemed to favour the inclusion of people in the drawings. Around a third of all the drawings conveyed information pertaining to user experience and in particular, expressions of tangible magic.

This chapter describes Wizard of Oz studies and gives a historical view that includes a summary of the literature in which several studies that used the method with mobile technology are discussed. The use of Wizard of Oz for mobile applications is explored by referencing the literature and by examination of a case study. A taxonomy for Wizard of Oz studies is presented that has been derived from a study of the literature in this area. A set of guidelines is presented that outlines the essential considerations in planning a Wizard of Oz study for mobile applications. The chapter concludes with some thoughts for future Wizard of Oz studies.

Publisher Summary The survey methods described in this chapter are questionnaires, rating scales, and structured interviews. Surveys are an established instrument for data gathering, and they are reported as being used with children as early as the 1890s. However, research and knowledge about the effectiveness of different child survey methods are scarce. Surveys involve questions and answers, and they typically fall into one of two categories: questionnaires or interviews. Three people are involved in surveys: the designer, the administrator, and the respondent. This chapter considers the different purposes of surveys and introduces the reader to the styles of questionnaires that are specifically for children and the general pitfalls and difficulties associated with the use of survey methods with children.

In this poster we report the findings from a study of technologies in the home and school and use these results to discuss the validity and variability of children's reports of technologies. The results indicate that children may not understand well the types of interactive technologies that were discussed and that there may be some confusion about the names of technologies. In addition, the study indicated some confusion about where a technology resides.

This chapter illustrates how some of the techniques are recruited and combined throughout the design of an interactive game. The case study provided here also illustrates how working with a small number of children, who participate in all evaluations, can be an efficient and effective way of involving children, although, at the end, testing with a different group of children could have been beneficial. The chapter shows how evaluation with children can be embedded in the interaction design process. It describes a series of evaluations that informed the design of Camelot, a mobile outdoor game intended to encourage social interaction among children aged 7 to 10. A single game concept named Camelot was formed as a synthesis and adaptation of the earlier game concepts. Its aim is to construct a toy castle before the opposing team constructs theirs. To build a castle, teams need to collect virtual resources spread around a large playing area, which could be the size of a playground.

This chapter discusses the detailed design of an evaluation, introducing and explaining the need for pilot-testing, examining the design of tasks, and highlighting the need for organization of the evaluation in advance. The chapter assumes that the goals of the evaluation are already established, the style of the evaluation is already determined, and the location of, and possible participants in, the evaluation are already identified. The discussion begins with recruitment of participants and then considers the preparation of technology and evaluation instruments before considering order and activity planning and the communication of the plans to the people involved in the study. Preparing technology and evaluation instruments is discussed here, which explains that the initial evaluation plan will indicate what technology and what method of evaluation will be used. At the planning stage, the technology has to be checked and adapted to the location of the study, any work to be done by the children must be specified, and any evaluation instruments must be prepared.

This chapter describes the ethical issues that relate to evaluating products with children. The ethical principles for evaluation that are discussed in the chapter are respect for other people, beneficence and nonmaleficence, and justice. The chapter argues that ethical decisions are subjective, and even experienced evaluators are likely to disagree in some circumstances about whether a proposed action is ethical. One reason for some of the disagreement is that individuals will have different approaches to ethical issues involving children based on their own background, education, and views about children and childhood. The three different approaches are the utilitarian view, the virtue-based approach, and the rights-based approach. Most countries have laws that regulate some of the relevant decisions, such as health and safety, child protection, human rights, and data protection legislation.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses some of the requirements for field evaluations and long-term evaluations, and it introduces the diary method and the parent evaluator method, which was developed as a way to evaluate home products for children who cannot yet read and write. The chapter outlines some of the key aspects of the diary method for evaluation. It describes how to design diaries, how to organize diary studies, and how to engage parents in the evaluation of interactive products. Diary methods appear to have considerable potential, especially when an evaluation needs to be carried out over an extended period of time, or when the evaluation is better carried out in a home situation. More research needs to be done to determine guidelines for the best design of diaries for various purposes. The parent evaluator method seems to be a good choice for evaluations with preschool children and may also be useful with babies and toddlers.

This chapter examines a range of technological solutions to the problem of recording interaction between children and products. Logging the activities of children is an attractive option for usability studies. These methods are unobtrusive and can often run alongside other evaluation activities. Some methods need special treatment when used with children but, in general, the use of these methods is relatively straightforward although care must be taken, especially when recording children, to ensure that the logging method does not interfere with the interaction of the child with the product. The technologies used for evaluation are normally used alongside or as part of the evaluation methods. The technologies covered include automated logging of interactions, video and audio recording, and gaze tracking. Automated logging involves recording the user's inputs to a system in a way that is not intrusive so that the user's actions can be examined or analyzed later. Video and audio technologies have obvious applications for recording users' reactions in observation studies, but they can also be used in interviews as an alternative to simultaneous note taking and in usability tests as a convenient method of recording task completion times. Gaze-tracking technologies can be used to record where users are looking as they perform tasks.

This chapter provides the preliminary steps for planning the evaluation study and the stage at which the study is crystallized and captured. It introduces terminology and concepts that will be useful when contemplating and discussing evaluation studies. It presents different approaches for, and purposes of, evaluations and outlines the different criteria that might be used to formulate evaluation goals. Further, it discusses how different approaches might be served by different evaluation methods and analysis procedures and demonstrates how any evaluation study represents a trade-off between control and the realism that a test setup can achieve. There are several purposes for the evaluation. The first step is deciding what the evaluation study is trying to achieve. Different purposes may require different approaches to evaluation, different data to be collected, and different analysis procedures. The evaluation purposes have several distinctions: diagnostic evaluations, formative and summative evaluations, and exploratory, measurement, and experimental studies.

This chapter is a practical guide to what should be done on the day of the evaluation. It discusses setting up the location, giving instructions, managing time, and dealing with difficulties. In an evaluation, much of the mood is set at the very beginning, when the children and the evaluators come together. What is said at this point by way of introductions and instructions can have a significant effect on the evaluation study as a whole. It is worth considering how the outsider feels at the start of an evaluation. The evaluation ends, and, depending on the sort of work that was done, there will be many outputs, probably including a great feeling of relief, a messy room, and a mound of paperwork or videotapes.

In this paper we describe the analysis of the outcomes of a design session with children. Designing with children is often considered an inspirational activity mainly useful for the designers to get first hand insights of the users' world. For this study we attempt an analytical approach to the results of a specific design session where children used low-tech prototyping to design the content of an interactive interface for a museum context. This analysis helped to inform the design of the specific product but was also useful to investigate methods of interpreting qualitative data of this kind. The analysis showed that the design method employed enabled the children to consider design features but also demonstrated that in some areas the children had only a limited understanding. Results from this work will be used to improve, and describe future design sessions.

This chapter deals with a case study that describes how the Wizard of Oz (WOz) method was employed in the design of computer vision-based action game that are controlled with body movements. The game does not require keyboards or traditional game controllers, and it uses a web camera and a microphone to “see and hear” the player. The main challenge in the interaction design of perceptual action games is to ensure the usability and playability of the game controls. These qualities are, on the other hand, highly dependent on the intuitiveness and physical appropriateness of the movements used to control the game character. This case study also illustrates how the selection of the evaluation method is bound to the features of the interactive product, context of use, and target user groups.

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the inspection methods, where an expert or a team of experts analyzes the designed interaction with the goal of creating a list of design improvements. An expert in this context is someone who is trained in the use of the evaluation method. Inspection methods are quite well studied in the literature, where they are referred to by a variety of names, such as expert evaluations, reviews, and analytical evaluation methods. The term inspection implies that the evaluation is not empirical, so it does not require that children use a product or prototype, and the evaluation requires the judgment of an expert rather than calculating quality metrics or running simulations. Inspection methods are a good option when it is difficult to involve children in the evaluation process directly. The nature of inspection methods is such that some detailed decisions must be in place regarding the interaction design, and the evaluation requires some level of detail in the prototypes to be evaluated.

Publisher Summary This chapter covers a range of techniques that encourage, prompt, or require children to talk about the interaction with the product. The terms verbalization data, verbal protocol, and verbal data are used interchangeably to refer to a record of things. Verbalization techniques are a valuable complement to observation during testing. They help in understanding why children behave the way they do, whether or not the system is clear to them, and whether or not it is fun or boring. Verbalization can be obtained from a structured monologue, through a structural dialogue with the tester, and between children. The chapter also discusses constructive interaction, an established technique that is adapted for child testers, and peer tutoring, a technique developed especially for obtaining verbal data from children.

This chapter provides an overview of child development theories and highlights the diverse nature of children, their lack of homogeneity, and their widely differing talents and motivations. It provides a sense of children and childhood and also outlines some basic child psychology. As a population children change over time in similar ways: They grow bigger, get stronger, and learn more. However, across a similar population, individual children can also have many differences. Child development is the study of these differences and similarities. An understanding of child development is necessary for individuals who want to carry out evaluation studies with and for children. This understanding will help prevent errors in judgment, minimize poor design of evaluation studies, and provide more believable results. The chapter also discusses the stages of child development that include physical development, socioemotional development, and cognitive development. These developments are intended to explain the differences and similarities between children that change with age.

This chapter discusses several issues, including the selection of participants, the selection of metrics, and the difficulties in gathering opinions from children, especially where novel technology is involved. The study that is described is intended to determine the relative usefulness of four different input technologies for children. It compares four input methods—a mouse, a keyboard, speech recognition, and handwriting recognition—and includes children between ages 6 and 10. This case study's most important characteristics are the organization of the study and the method used to ensure that the findings had reasonable reliability. This case study demonstrates some key aspects of using small groups of children in observational and behavioral studies. The use of survey methods is explored in the study, and interesting aspects about children's views of input technologies are gathered.

There are some activities that are supposed to be completed after evaluation. This process involves some reflection and action and a more analytical mindset. This chapter examines the functions, beginning when the evaluation has concluded and ending when the findings are reported. The products of the evaluation, in their untreated form, constitute raw data. Raw data can exist in a variety of forms, including questionnaires, interview notes, observation notes, videotapes, or electronic logs. Raw data generally need some attention before they can be interpreted and used. The data extracted are analyzed and coded. Analysis is the process of taking data and discovering what story they tell. Generally, the process of coding and analyzing data is different for quantitative and qualitative data. It is important to safeguard the data gathered during an evaluation and the media on which they are stored.

Publisher Summary The term observation refers to an examination of a phenomenon that results in a description suitable for the purposes of a research or evaluation study. Observations can be direct or indirect. Direct observations rely on the senses of the observer, who might watch or listen to how children use the product evaluated. Indirect observations are those where records of use are created through technology, such as logs of user interactions, logs of eye gaze, and so forth. Observation is invaluable when it comes to evaluating products for children. Observing children who test a prototype or product can provide new insights to designers and can provide solid evidence to support design recommendations or other conclusions based on evaluation. This chapter discusses approaches to observation that are applicable for evaluating products with children.

This paper describes an empirical study on typing errors made by children during a text copy exercise. The literature on text input errors is first examined, focussing on studies of errors that occur during keyboard typing. A study of errors made by children during typing is described and the results from this study are analysed using visual inspection and already published error categorisation methods. These methods are compared with respect to the types and number of errors categorised and uncategorised. We identify and define new kinds of typing errors and use these, together with previously defined error types, to outline an expanded and more detailed method (ExpECT) for the classification of typing errors. ExpECT is compared with the previously examined categorisation methods and is shown to be a more thorough and broader method for the analysis of typing errors.

This paper describes an empirical study that considered the immediate usability of digital ink with two groups of children. The first group comprised children aged between 5 and 6 and the second group were aged between 8 and 9. The experiment is described together with a discount method for evaluating the readability of digital ink for children. This method is used to derive readability and usability results. These results demonstrate that digital ink provided a good experience for most of the older children but for the younger children, without modification, the technology was not suitable. A discussion of appropriate metrics for the evaluation of text input with recognition based digital ink input is provided and areas for further work are highlighted.

This chapter considers text input from the perspective of two user groups, the elderly and the young. Considering these two groups, the focus is on justifying designing for them, highlighting the differences that need to be designed for, and outlining any specialist technologies. The elderly or young computer user needs to be able to find a method to carry out effective text input in order to access the technology. The problem is not limited to traditional computers; mobile phones, small devices, and information terminals all require text input and several different methods are needed. The chapter therefore considers text input for the elderly and the young. Change comes with age; children grow into adults and adults grow old. Aging is often considered to be only about the bodily function of individuals, but this very limited view does not take into account the social environment and the effects of experience.

This paper reflects on the design value that emerges from evaluation methods used in the field of child computer interaction. The work is based around an evaluation study of a tangible game prototype for children. The prototype and the evaluation techniques used are described. The authors provide a reflection on the analysis of results from one of the methods and use this analysis to propose a direct connection with design tools.

In this paper, we describe three studies for the design of a hand-held music device for children. The studies involved researchers from different disciplines and children from different schools. We reflected on what happened during the design activities. And we looked at the outputs produced by the children in order to understand the feasibility of the activities that were included in the design sessions from two perspectives: whether they contributed to the design of the product – termed their capability – and whether they suitably involved children in the process – called their suitability . We then report on how children’s ideas were selected and integrated into the product design through iterative cycles of testing and refinements. This description of the process prompted the discussion on the involvement of children and their ideas throughout the whole process, its benefit and difficulties that could be applicable to a wide variety of design contexts with children.