Assessing fun: young children as evaluators of interactive systems.

In this paper, we describe an exploratory study on the challenges of conducting usability tests with very young children aged 3 to 4 years old (nursery age) and the differences when working with older children aged 5 to 6 years old (primary school). A pilot study was conducted at local nursery and primary schools to understand and experience the challenges working with young children interacting with computer products. We report on the studies and compare the experiences of working with children of different age groups in evaluation studies of interactive systems

Children searching information on the Internet: Performance on children's interfaces compared to Google

Children frequently make use of the Internet to search for information. However, research shows that children experience many problems with searching and browsing the web. The last decade numerous search environments have been developed, especially for children. Do these search interfaces support children in effective information-seeking? And do these interfaces add value to today’s popular search engines, such as Google? In this explorative study, we compared children’s search performance on four interfaces designed for children, with their performance on Google. We found that the children did not perform better on these interfaces than on Google. This study also uncovered several problems that children experienced with these search interfaces, which can be of use for designers of future search interfaces for children

Seesaw: An Interactive Display To Facilitate Social Interaction

This paper introduces Seesaw an interactive environment prototype that assists children to conquer common/potential fear during social communication in order to facilitate interactions that provide enhanced group-learning activities. Based on the games studies which emphasize children's psycho-behavioral and cognitive aspects, Seesaw aims at lowering the mental fears among 3-8 year old children, hence facilitating their social behavior. This prototype uniquely combines virtual reality and multi-touch technology. The design has been based mainly on the methodologies of tangible interaction design

Evaluating the Interaction Design of General Tasks in Children's Mobile Apps

The poster reports current findings in a project focusing on UX evaluation of children’s mobile apps. We adopt field study in the research to first evaluate the interaction design of general tasks, including selecting, saving and deleting, in typical children’s mobile apps. Qualitative analysis is conducted to summarize the interaction behavior of children aged from 4 to 6 based on video data collected from participant observation. We derive corresponding design principles to provide insights for designers in the industry.The poster also discusses future focus in this research field.ye

Practical and ethical concerns in usability testing with children

It is common practice to evaluate interactive technology with users. In industry, usability companies typically carry out these evaluations, and the participants in the evaluation are usually adults. In research studies, researchers who do not do this sort of work on a daily basis, typically perform the evaluation. Complexity can be increased if the researcher is also the developer of the software and if the users are children. This case study explores that space, the evaluation of software with researchers / developers with children. The chapter describes the evaluation of an educational game that was designed to teach Spanish to children. The chapter outlines the planning for, and the execution of, a usability study of the game with 25 children aged 7-8 in a school in the UK. The study used two methods to try and discover usability problems; direct observation and retrospective think-aloud, and also gathered user experience data using the Fun Toolkit. The focus in this chapter is less on the results of the evaluation (although these are presented) but more on the practical and ethical concerns of conducting usability evaluations of games with children within a school setting. Those reading the chapter will gather hints and tips from the narrative and will better understand the use of the three methods included in the study. In addition, the researcher / developer role is discussed and it is shown that the methods used here enabled children to make judgments without the ownership of the product being an issue. To make the main points more concrete, the chapter closes with a set of ‘key points’ to consider when doing usability testing with children in schools

An Experiential Approach to the Design and Evaluation of a Gamified Research Tool for Law in Children's Lives

ABSTRACT The aim of the project Law in Children's Lives is to gamify the research activity of collecting data with a digital game to assess children's awareness of law in their everyday lives. Our main research goal is to address the theoretical and practical concerns in gamification through a user(child)-centred experiential approach. We grounded the design and evaluation of the game in the established User Experience (UX) theoretical frameworks -Hassenzahl's hedonicpragmatic model and McCarthy & Wright's four threads of experience. The game prototype consists of four microworlds with each comprising a set of scenarios where children are asked to select an action option and record their reasons by talking to the non-player character. The game was evaluated with 634 children aged 7-11 years. The levels of perceived fun, interestingness and ease of playing were generally high. The game could stimulate the children to think about the given scenarios and beyond them

« Teegi, il est trop beau »: Exemple d'évaluation du potentiel pédagogique d'une interface tangible interactive pour enfants en contexte scolaire

International audienceThe cerebral activity is an intangible physiological process difficult to apprehend, especially for children. With the aim of providing a new type of educational support, we studied the pedagogical potential of an interactive tangible interface (Teegi) designed to be used in educational context. This interface aims at enabling children to discover the relation between the brain activity and the human body functions. We propose in this study a methodology to evaluate its pedagogical potential in real context of use, considering the specificities of the children. This study, carried out with 29 pupils, highlights the strengths of this system, both in terms of its usability and its impact on learning. Moreover, the results provided by this methodology revealed possible improvements for a greater pedagogical effectiveness. This type of interactive interface, as well as the evaluation method proposed, paves the way for the pedagogical use of new interactive and tangible devices at school.L’activité cérébrale est un processus physiologique intangible qui peut être difficile à appréhender, notamment pour des enfants. Pour répondre aux besoins en supports pédagogiques et favoriser les apprentissages liés à ce type de concepts, nous étudions le potentiel d’une interface tangible interactive dédiée à la visualisation d’activités cérébrales (Teegi) en contexte éducatif. Nous proposons une méthodologie d’évaluation du potentiel pédagogique en contexte réel d’utilisation par des enfants. Cette étude réalisée avec 29 enfants, met en évidence les forces de ce système, tant au niveau de son utilisabilité que de ses impacts sur les apprentissages visés. Les résultats obtenus mettent en lumière des axes d’améliorations possibles pour une plus grande efficacité pédagogique. Ce type d’interface, ainsi que la méthode d’évaluation que nous proposons, ouvrent la voie de l’utilisation pédagogique de nouveaux dispositifs interactifs et tangibles en milieu scolaire

Software development for cognitive enrichment of the attentional control skill in the context of executive functions

Las funciones ejecutivas son unas capacidades psicológicas de alta importancia para el desarrollo sano de los niños, ya que su mal desarrollo está relacionado con determinados problemas como el trastorno de déficit de atención. En este TFG está relacionado las funciones ejecutivas, poniendo énfasis en la atención. A partir del entendimiento de como ésta funciona, se ha trabajado en el desarrollo juegos serios para entrenar la atención con tareas como “busca las diferencias”, “encuentra elementos en la escena””. Estos juegos están, destinados a enriquecer las habilidades cognitivas de niños de infantil (de 3 a 5 años) y monitorizar dichas actividades. Los juegos se desarrollan en JavaScript y se integran en el sistema de evaluación automática Siette para evaluar y monitorizar el proceso de aprendizaje de los usuarios. En paralelo se ha desarrollado un sistema de registro de eventos de modo que guardaremos en un log todas las pulsaciones realizadas por un niño para que psicólogos y educadores puedan analizar el comportamiento en profundidad. Este log se almacenará en un fichero alojado en un servidor diferente de siette, usando un software de servidor implementado para tal propósito en este TFG. Todo el software se ha desarrollado siguiendo una metodología ágil y ha sido probado y evaluado con niños de educación infantil con tablets conectados a Internet