Days of our lives: Family experiences of digital technology use

© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. This paper describes findings from a workshop, with 11 parents of children under 12 years of age, that explored family experiences of digital technology use. We found that technology experiences within everyday family life are complicated and interlinked. We highlight four experiences that featured most prominently with our participants: apprehension, ambivalence, compromise and conflict. In addition, we discuss how family values govern these experiences and how families use digital technology. This work contributes to current understandings of how family values guide technology practices. These early findings suggest that deeper understandings of family values; how they are shared, negotiated and put into action, will help inform the design of future technologies that not only support families' practices and activities, but also their experiences and aspirations

Olly: A tangible for togetherness

This research explores how tangible interactive technology might offer opportunities for socialization and sensory regulation. We present a study carried out in an educational setting during leisure activities with a small group of children with autism who like music. We introduce Όλοι (pronounced Olly), a sonic textile Tangible User Interface (TUI) designed around the observations of five minimally verbal children with autism aged between 5-10 years. The TUI was tested for an average of 24 minutes once per week, over a period of five weeks in a specialized school based in North-East London, UK. We propose a methodological approach that embraces diversity and promotes designs that support repetitive movements and self-regulation to provide the children with a favorable environment and tools to socialize with peers. The findings show positive outcomes with regards to spontaneous social interactions between peers particularly when children interacted with or around Olly. These were observed in the form of eye-contact, turn-taking, sharing (of the space, the object and experience), and more complex social play dynamics like associative and cooperative play. We illustrate how the TUI was a positive stimulus of social behaviors and discuss design implications for novel technologies that aim to foster shared experiences between children with autism

Designing for the 'at home' experience of parents and children with tablet games

Tablet games are flooding the market and large numbers of these are designed for children. The expansion of quantity has not seen an associated expansion of quality. Studies of the usability of tablet games for children typically take place in laboratory settings and fail to understand the context of use. This paper describes a study of 'at home' use of tablet games with children and their families that sought to examine how such games were played and how parents managed such game play. The children who participated in the study had cognitive, sensory or physical needs and these multiple needs brought many difficulties to the surface for parents mediating tablet use. A thematic analysis using four codes was applied to bring findings from diaries and interviews. Challenges for general tablet game design have emerged around designing for family routines, designing for working together, and designing to scaffold children's understanding

Playful E-textile Sonic Interaction for Socially Engaged and Open-Ended Play Between Autistic Children

Research on the potential benefits of technology for autistic children is an emergent field in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), especially within the Child-Computer Interaction Community. This thesis contributes a design approach grounded in theories of play, cognitive development, and autism to expand the discourse on methodological guidelines for performing empirical studies with non-verbal autistic children and to extend the design space to cater to the socio-emotional and sensory needs of this population. The thesis reveals how sonic e-textile Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can be used effectively to mediate children’s social participation in playful activities. This is demonstrated through developing three explorative field-studies conducted at a specialist school based in North-East London where two sonic e-textile playful TUIs, namely Mazi and Olly, have been created and tested with three groups of autistic children aged between 5-10. The three studies ran over the period of three years and were designed to investigate the potentials of TUIs as shareable toys during leisure and recreational activities to a) support social and playful interactions among peers and b) provide opportunities for self-regulation. The key contributions of this thesis are the designs of two tangible user interfaces, which offer a set of design approaches to guide researchers through creating shareable and playful tangibles for non-verbal autistic children; a framework for analysis and a thorough evaluation process that other researchers could use to assess the efficacy of playful TUI designs for nonverbal autistic children; and an in-depth discussion about the research process, which offers a new perspective about holistic designs and evaluation of technologies that aim to scaffold play in groups non-verbal autistic children

On accessible Visual Programming Tools for children with Autism Spectrum Condition and additional learning disabilities

Visual Programming Tools (VPTs) provide a visual programming and execution environment, in addition to other visual resources and tools appropriate for creating visual programs for a particular domain. Several VPTs have been created for teaching children to program at an early age. Research on the use of these tools to teach programming, academic and non-academic skills has reported positive results. However, children with learning disabilities including those also diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are left out of research in this area. Therefore, this research aims to contribute to existing knowledge in this area by exploring the accessibility of existing VPTs for this group of users and creating design tools and recommendations for the design of accessible VPTs for this target group. This research began with the evaluation of the accessibility of the most popular VPT, Scratch. A user evaluation was conducted with seven children with learning disabilities, five of them were also diagnosed with ASC; three special education needs teachers were also interviewed as part of the evaluation. Analysis of the findings from this evaluation showed that the children faced several difficulties while using Scratch to create stories; and also identified the causes of the difficulties. Accessibility heuristics were derived from the identified 'causes of difficulties' and were used to evaluate the accessibility of three additional VPTs. The findings of this second evaluation showed that the assessed VPTs have features similar to those of Scratch that caused accessibility difficulties to the target group. In creating tools and recommendations for designing accessible VPTs, the research focused on children with ASC (with learning disabilities) due to the match between their reported preferences and the features of VPTs. A method of creating personae to represent their requirements and goals was created and used to create three data-grounded personae. Experts were then interviewed to propose a set of recommendations for designing accessible VPTs for the target group. Therefore, this research contributed methods for conducting accessibility evaluation of VPTs for children with learning disabilities and for creating personae for children with ASC; a theoretical model for the use of VPTs by children with learning disabilities in a class setting to achieve a learning goal; findings on the accessibility of existing VPTs for children with learning disabilities; and recommendations for designing accessible VPTs for children with ASC