Interactive technologies for preschool game-based instruction: Experiences and future challenges

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Entertainment Computing. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Entertainment Computing, vol. 17 (2016). DOI 10.1016/j.entcom.2016.07.001.[EN] According to current kindergarten curricula, game play is an important basis for children development and it is the main driving force when designing educational activities during early childhood. This paper presents a review of the current state of the art of game technologies that support pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children development. Moreover, the most emergent technologies for developing educational games for preschool children are identified and a set of future challenges are discussed. The main goal of this work is to review the state of the art in interactive technologies which will help educators, game designers and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) experts in the area of game-based kindergarten instruction. 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work received financial support from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with the project TIN2014-60077-R (SUPEREMOS). This work is also supported by a predoctoral 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.Nácher-Soler, VE.; García Sanjuan, F.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2016). Interactive technologies for preschool game-based instruction: Experiences and future challenges. Entertainment Computing. 17:19-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2016.07.001S19291

Interactive tabletops in education

Interactive tabletops are gaining increased attention from CSCL researchers. This paper analyses the relation between this technology and teaching and learning processes. At a global level, one could argue that tabletops convey a socio-constructivist flavor: they support small teams that solve problems by exploring multiple solutions. The development of tabletop applications also witnesses the growing importance of face-to-face collaboration in CSCL and acknowledges the physicality of learning. However, this global analysis is insufficient. To analyze the educational potential of tabletops in education, we present 33 points that should be taken into consideration. These points are structured on four levels: individual user-system interaction, teamwork, classroom orchestration, and socio-cultural contexts. God lies in the detail

Kindertivity: Usability and Communicability Strategies for Interactive Surfaces and Pre-Kindergarten Children

Tesis por compendio[ES] La tecnología multi-táctil se ha convertido en una de las más emergentes tras experimentar un enorme crecimiento desde sus pasos iniciales en los años ochenta hasta su amplia aceptación y uso en la actualidad. Por una parte, la tecnología multi-táctil se basa en el estilo de interacción de manipulación directa el cual proporciona a los usuarios la ventaja de ver los objetos y las acciones de interés, sustituir comandos escritos por acciones de señalado y, además, permite la realización de acciones rápidas, reversibles e incrementales evitando el uso de instrucciones complejas. Por otra parte, diversos trabajos han evaluado las virtudes derivadas de utilizar conjuntamente la manipulación directa con el toque directo mostrando que es posible evitar los problemas inherentes a otras técnicas de interacción como el ratón y el teclado. Por lo tanto, aprovechando la interacción natural e intuitiva proporcionada por la tecnología multi-táctil, ésta parece una forma ideal para dar soporte a la creación de escenarios educativos dirigidos a niños en edad preescolar. Sin embargo, a pesar de la existencia de diversos estudios que evalúan la idoneidad de utilizar el estilo de interacción de manipulación directa, existe una falta de trabajos abordando el uso dispositivos basados en superficies táctiles con niños de una temprana edad. Asimismo, en la actualidad existe una creciente tendencia a diseñar aplicaciones educativas y lúdicas dirigidas a niños en edad preescolar utilizando dispositivos multi-táctiles como los teléfonos inteligentes o las tabletas. Además, diversos informes señalan que los niños son usuarios frecuentes de este tipo de dispositivos y los utilizan incluso antes de ser capaces de hablar. Sin embargo, a pesar de este crecimiento en el uso de la tecnología multi-táctil y su aparente idoneidad para ser utilizado en el desarrollo de aplicaciones educativas para niños en edad preescolar, no existen unas interacciones universales y estandarizadas para preescolares a la hora de utilizar dispositivos táctiles ya que habitualmente sólo se utilizan dos gestos básicos (básicamente, el toque con un dedo para seleccionar y el arrastre con un dedo para el movimiento). Por lo tanto, existe una clara necesidad de llevar a cabo estudios empíricos para contribuir y avanzar en el diseño de aplicaciones que den un soporte adecuado y encaje con las habilidades de los niños en su temprano desarrollo. Por tanto, esta tesis propone, diseña y evalúa diversas estrategias de usabilidad y comunicabilidad adaptadas a los niños en edad preescolar para establecer la base para el diseño y desarrollo de futuras aplicaciones basadas en dispositivos táctiles dirigidas a preescolares. Estas estrategias llevarán a la adecuada definición de guías de diseño que permitirán a los niños aprovechar al máximo la tecnología multi-táctil, harán posible el desarrollo de nuevas y atractivas aplicaciones y, eventualmente, también podrán ayudar al desarrollo cognitivo y motor de los niños.[CA] La tecnologia multi-tàctil s'ha convertit en una de les més emergents després d'experimentar un enorme creixement des dels seus passos inicials als anys vuitanta fins l'actualitat on es àmpliament acceptada i utilitzada. D'una banda, la tecnologia multi-tàctil es basa en l'estil d'interacció de manipulació directa, el qual proporciona als usuaris l'avantatge de veure els objectes i les accions d'interès, substituir comandos escrits per accions d'assenyalament i, a més, permet la realització d'accions, ràpides, reversibles i incrementals evitant l'ús d'instruccions complexes. D'altra banda, diversos treballs han avaluat les virtuts derivades d'utilitzar conjuntament la manipulació directa amb el toc directe mostrant que és possible evitar els problemes inherents a altres tècniques d'interacció com el ratolí i el teclat. Per tant, aprofitant la interacció natural i intuïtiva proporcionada per la tecnologia multi-tàctil, aquesta sembla una forma ideal per donar suport a la creació d'escenaris educatius per a xiquets en edat preescolar. No obstant això, malgrat l'existència de diversos estudis que avaluen la idoneïtat d'utilitzar l'estil d'interacció de manipulació directa, existeix una manca de treballs abordant l'ús de dispositius basats en superfícies tàctils amb xiquets d'edat primerenca. Així mateix, en l'actualitat existeix una creixent tendència a dissenyar aplicacions educatives i lúdiques dirigides a xiquets en edat preescolar utilitzant dispositius tàctils com els telèfons intel¿ligents o les tauletes. A més, diversos informes assenyalen que els xiquets són usuaris freqüents d'aquests tipus de dispositius i els utilitzen fins i tot abans de ser capaços de parlar. Malgrat aquest creixement en l'ús de la tecnologia multi-tàctil i la seua aparent idoneïtat per a ser utilitzada en el desenvolupament d'aplicacions educatives per a xiquets en edat preescolar, no existeixen unes interaccions universals i estandarditzades per a preescolars a l'hora d'utilitzar dispositius tàctils ja que habitualment només s'utilitzen dos gestos bàsics (bàsicament, el toc amb un dit per a seleccionar i l'arrossegament amb un dit per al moviment). Per tant, hi ha una clara necessitat de dur a terme estudis empírics per a contribuir i avançar en el disseny d'aplicacions que donen un suport adequat i s'ajusten amb les habilitats dels xiquets en el seu primerenc desenvolupament. Per tant, la tesi proposa, dissenya i avalua diverses estratègies de usabilitat i comunicabilitat adaptades als xiquets en edat preescolar per tal d'establir la base per al disseny i desenvolupament de futures aplicacions basades en dispositius tàctils dirigides a preescolars. Aquestes estratègies portaran a l'adequada definició de guies de disseny que permetran als xiquets aprofitar al màxim la tecnologia multi-tàctil, faran possible el desenvolupament de noves i atractives aplicacions i, eventualment, podran també ajudar al desenvolupament cognitiu i motor dels xiquets.[EN] Multi-touch technology has become one of the most emergent technologies and has had an enormous growth since its initial steps in the eighties to be widespread accepted and used in the present. On the one hand, multi-touch technology relies on the direct manipulation interaction style which gives users the advantage to view the objects and actions of interest, replace typed commands by pointing actions and to perform rapid, reversible and incremental actions avoiding using complex instructions. On the other hand, several works have evaluated the virtues when joining direct manipulation with direct-touching showing that it solves the problems inherent in other interaction devices, such as those involving mouse or keyboard. Hence, taking advantage of the intuitive and natural interaction provided by multi-touch technology it seems an ideal way to support educational scenarios targeted to kindergarten children. Although several works have assessed the suitability of using the direct manipulation style with children, there is a lack of works addressing the use of touchscreen devices by this specific type of users. Moreover, there is a growing trend of designing educational and playful applications targeted to kindergarten children based on touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets. In addition, several reports point out that children use touchscreen devices even before they are able to speak and they are frequent users of devices such as smartphones and tablets. However, despite this growth in the use of multi-touch technology by children and its apparent suitability to be used to develop applications targeted to young children, there is a lack of standardized and universally accepted interactions for young children when using touchscreen devices since only two basic gestures are commonly used (basically, consisting of only one-finger touch for selection and one-finger drag for movement). Hence, there is a need of carrying out empirical studies to help and advance in the design of applications that adequately support and fit with children's development and skills. Therefore, this thesis proposes, designs and evaluates several usability and communicability strategies tailored to children in their early development stage to establish the design and development of future applications targeted to kindergarten children. These strategies will lead to define appropriate design strategies that enable infants to take full advantage of multi-touch technology, would make it possible to develop attractive new applications and, eventually, could also aid children's cognitive and motor development.Nácher Soler, VE. (2019). Kindertivity: Usability and Communicability Strategies for Interactive Surfaces and Pre-Kindergarten Children [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/116833TESISCompendi

Exploring visual prompts for communicating directional awareness to kindergarten children

[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.Nácher-Soler, VE.; Jurdi, S.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; García Sanjuan, F. (2019). Exploring visual prompts for communicating directional awareness to kindergarten children. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 126:14-25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.01.003S142512

Multi-touch Technology in Early Childhood: Current Trends and Future Challenges

© ACM 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Interacción '15 Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on Human Computer Interactionhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/{10.1145/2829875.2829887The advantages of the direct manipulation style make the multi-touch technology an ideal mechanism to support learning activities for children. Moreover, although pre-kindergarten children are becoming frequent users of the technology little work has been done in the area to assess their actual abilities. This paper goes over the state of the art of multi-touch technology targeting pre-kindergarten children and its use for educational purposes. In addition, in this work we present future challenges that should be faced in the area in the near future to establish the basis on which designers will develop educational applications for children that fully exploit the multi-touch technology according to the actual abilities of pre-kindergarten children.Work supported by the MINECO (grants TIN2010-20488 and TIN2014-60077-R) and from GVA (ACIF/2015/075).Nácher-Soler, VE.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2015). Multi-touch Technology in Early Childhood: Current Trends and Future Challenges. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2829875.2829887SAbdul Aziz, N.A., Batmaz, F., Stone, R., and Paul, C. Selection of touch gestures for children's applications. Proc. of SIC'13, 721--726.Abdul Aziz, N.A., Mat, N.S., Batmaz, F., Stone, R., and Paul, C. Selection of Touch Gestures for Children's Applications: Repeated Experiment to Increase Reliability. 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Interaction Design and Children. Foundations and Trends® in Human-Computer Interaction 1, 4 (2007), 277--392.Ingram, A., Wang, X., and Ribarsky, W. Towards the establishment of a framework for intuitive multi-touch interaction design. Proc. of AVI'12, 66--73.Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Cummins, M. The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 K-12. The New Media Consortium, Austin, Texas, 2012.Kammer, D., Dang, R., Steinhauf, J., and Groh, R. Investigating interaction with tabletops in kindergarten environments. Proc. of IDC'14, 57--66.Knoche, H., Rasmussen, N.A., and Boldreel, K. Do Interactions Speak Louder than Words? Dialogic Reading of an Interactive Tablet-based E-book with Children between 16 Months and Three Years of Age. Proc. of IDC'14, 285--288.Kremer, K.E. Conducting Game User Experience Research with Preschoolers. Workshop on Games User Research: practice, methods, and applications (collocated to CHI'12).Nacher, V., Jaen, J., Catala, A., Navarro, E., and Gonzalez, P. Improving Pre-Kindergarten Touch Performance. Proc. of ITS '14, 163--166.Nacher, V., Jaen, J., and Catala, A. Exploring Visual Cues for Intuitive Communicability of Touch Gestures to Pre-kindergarten Children. Proc. of ITS '14, 159--162.Nacher, V., Jaen, J., Navarro, E., Catala, A., and González, P. Multi-touch gestures for pre-kindergarten children. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 73, (2015), 37--51.Piaget, J.The Child and Reality. Grossman, New York, 1973.Rushton, S. and Juola-Rushton, A. Classroom Learning Environment, Brain Research and The No Child Left Behind Initiative: 6 years Later. Early Childhood Education Journal 36, 1 (2008), 87--92.Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., and Jacobs, S. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. Prentice Hall, 2009.Shuler, C. iLearn II: An Analysis of the Education Category of the iTunes App Store. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, New York, 2012.Smith, S.P., Burd, E., and Rick, J. Developing, evaluating and deploying multi-touch systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 70, 10 (2012), 653--656.Vatavu, R., Cramariuc, G., and Schipor, D.M. Touch interaction for children aged 3 to 6 years: Experimental findings and relationship to motor skills. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 74, (2015), 54--76.Wakefield, J. and Smith, D. From Socrates to Satellites: iPad Learning in an Undergraduate Course. Creative Education 03, 05 (2012), 643--648.Wolock, E., Ann Orr, E.D., and Buckleitner, W. Child development 101 for the developers of interactive media. Active Learning Associates, Inc., 2006.Zaranis, N., Kalogiannakis, M., and Papadakis, S. Using Mobile Devices for Teaching Realistic Mathematics in Kindergarten Education. Creative Education 04, 07 (2013), 1--10

Light on horizontal interactive surfaces: Input space for tabletop computing

In the last 25 years we have witnessed the rise and growth of interactive tabletop research, both in academic and in industrial settings. The rising demand for the digital support of human activities motivated the need to bring computational power to table surfaces. In this article, we review the state of the art of tabletop computing, highlighting core aspects that frame the input space of interactive tabletops: (a) developments in hardware technologies that have caused the proliferation of interactive horizontal surfaces and (b) issues related to new classes of interaction modalities (multitouch, tangible, and touchless). A classification is presented that aims to give a detailed view of the current development of this research area and define opportunities and challenges for novel touch- and gesture-based interactions between the human and the surrounding computational environment. © 2014 ACM.This work has been funded by Integra (Amper Sistemas and CDTI, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation) and TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-01) projects and Programa de Becas y Ayudas para la Realización de Estudios Oficiales de Máster y Doctorado en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2010

Interactive tabletops in education

Interactive tabletops are gaining increased attention from CSCL researchers. This paper analyses the relation between this technology and teaching and learning processes. At a global level, one could argue that tabletops convey a socio-constructivist flavor: they support small teams that solve problems by exploring multiple solutions. The development of tabletop applications also witnesses the growing importance of face-to-face collaboration in CSCL and acknowledges the physicality of learning. However, this global analysis is insufficient. To analyze the educational potential of tabletops in education, we present 33 points that should be taken into consideration. These points are structured on four levels: individual user-system interaction, teamwork, classroom orchestration, and socio-cultural contexts. God lies in the details

Tangible user interfaces for learning

Tangible user interfaces (TUIs), systems characterised by the embodiment of interaction in physical objects, have attracted general interest but have not yet been widely adopted for learning. Employing these kinds of novel technologies could yield substantial benefits to learners. This paper provides a review of state-of-the-art TUIs for learning, scoped by a revised definition of TUIs that serves to delineate and differentiate these from other kinds of interfaces. We propose a classification framework that attends to important aspects of TUIs for use in learning and review tangible systems within this classification to expose research and design gaps. Our work provides guidance for researchers and learning technologists to help identify potential research directions for TUIs for learning

Game Technologies for Kindergarten Instruction: Experiences and Future Challenges

[EN] Games are an ideal mechanism to design educational activities with preschool children. Moreover, an analysis of current kindergarten curricula points out that playing and games are an important basis for children development. This paper presents a review of works that use games for kindergarten instruction and analyses their underlying technologies. In addition, in this work we present future challenges to be faced for each technology under consideration focusing on the specific needs and abilities these very demanding users have. The end goal is to outline a collection of future research directions for educators, game designers and HCI experts in the area of game-based kindergarten instruction supported by new technologies.This work received financial support from Spanish MINECO (projects TIN2010-20488 and TIN2014-60077-R), from Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV-FE-2014-24), and from GVA (ACIF/2014/214).Nácher-Soler, VE.; García Sanjuan, F.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2015). Game Technologies for Kindergarten Instruction: Experiences and Future Challenges. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/74255