How getting noticed helps getting on: successful attention capture doubles children's cooperative play

Cooperative social interaction is a complex skill that involves maintaining shared attention and continually negotiating a common frame of reference. Privileged in human evolution, cooperation provides support for the development of social-cognitive skills. We hypothesize that providing audio support for capturing playmates' attention will increase cooperative play in groups of young children. Attention capture was manipulated via an audio-augmented toy to boost children's attention bids. Study 1 (48 6- to 11-year-olds) showed that the augmented toy yielded significantly more cooperative play in triads compared to the same toy without augmentation. In Study 2 (33 7- to 9-year-olds) the augmented toy supported greater success of attention bids, which were associated with longer cooperative play, associated in turn with better group narratives. The results show how cooperation requires moment-by-moment coordination of attention and how we can manipulate environments to reveal and support mechanisms of social interaction. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of joint attention in the development of cooperative action and shared understanding

Augmented toy environments: shareable tangible user interfaces for edutainment, presented at the Shareable Interface Workshop at Open

Playing games has always been an important and essential part of human culture. Not only does playing serve the purpose of recreation and amusement; it also improves psychomotoric skills, and can often be considered as a common ground for socializing [1, 3]. While video games greatly enhance the capabilities of game design, thus potentially improving both the entertainment value and learning experience of a game (often summarized as “edutainment”), their rather solitary nature of interaction has often been criticized for lacking the social benefits of traditional games. Augmented toys and smart toys are traditional toys or game pieces that are equipped with sensing technology, computing power, and communication capabilities, allowing designers to incorporate nove

Integrating Interactive Learning Experiences into Augmented Toy Environments," presented at Pervasive Learning Workshop at Pervasive 2007

Abstract. The Augmented Knight’s Castle is a pervasive computing playset which enriches the children’s pretend play by using background music, sound effects and verbal commentary of toys that react to the childrens’s play. We argue that such an augmented playset offers ideal possibilities of seamlessly integrating interactive learning experiences: toy figures such as the king, a knight or a farmer teach children about the life in the Middle Ages from their perspective and depending on the context of play. In addition to these interactive stories, a variety of other learning scenarios can be integrated (e.g., children learn songs or poems from the troubadour by simply pointing at the figure with a magic wand). Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is used to automatically and unobtrusively identify the toys in the playset. Mobile devices equipped with RFID readers are introduced into the playset to provoke further interaction and to enhance the play.

An Infrastructure for Interactive and Playful Learning in Augmented Toy Environments

In this paper we describe our approach to realize a pervasive (computing) learning environment for children based on augmented toys: traditional toys that are equipped with pervasive computing technologies and can thus be linked with virtual information such as educational content. We report on our experiences building and deploying the Augmented Knight’s Castle, an augmented toy environment that allows for learning about the Middle Ages in a playful way. We demonstrate and discuss how educational content is provided in such an environment and describe the design of the underlying infrastructure.

RFIDice - Augmenting Tabletop Dice with RFID

Augmented dice allow players of tabletop games to have the result of a roll be automatically recorded by a computer, e.g., for supporting strategy games. We have built a set of three augmented-dice-prototypes based on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which allows us to build robust, cheap, and small augmented dice. Using a corresponding readout infrastructure and a sample application, we have evaluated our approach and show its advantages over other dice augmentation methods discussed in the literature