159 research outputs found
Building an alternative to the traditional computer terminal
Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1987.Bibliography: leaves 63-66.Allison Druin.M.S
Children's storytelling technologies: Differences in elaboration and recall
This paper is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by Angela Boltman in
partial fulfillment of a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at
College Park. This study could not have been accomplished without the generous
funding of the European Union's Experimental Schools Environments initiative
(project 29310) and the assistance of members of "KidStory", a three-year
research team that focused on creating storytelling technologies for young
children. We would particularly like to acknowledge Benjamin Bederson and Juan
Pablo Hourcade, our colleagues at the University of Maryland and chief
architects of the KidPad technology. We would like to thank Allison Farber, who
recreated the book images in KidPad for this study. Our colleagues Carina Fast
and Marita Kjellin at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Danae
Stanton, Sue Cobb, and Claire O'Malley at the University of Nottingham supported
the study in many ways. In addition, we would like to thank Steve Benford from
the University of Nottingham and Yngve Sundblad from the Royal Institute of
Technology for their project leadership and continual support of our research.
We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Melanie Killen at the University of Maryland as an ever-patient reviewer of this paper. Finally, we
would like to thank the children in England and Sweden who participated in the
study and who taught us a great deal about storytelling.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Allison Druin at
the University of Maryland, 3180 A.V. Williams Building, College Park, Maryland
20782 or electronically at [email protected].
Abstract
This study examined the elaboration and recall of children's stories through an
analysis of the content and structure of children's retelling of a wordless
picture book. The book was presented to 72 children (ages 6-7) in England and Sweden. Using a between subjects design, each child was presented with either a
paper version of the picture book, a computer presentation with traditional
hyperlinks, or a computer presentation with panning and zooming. The technology
that was used was KidPad, a children's spatial storytelling application (Druin
et al., 1997). Results revealed that the computer presentation with panning and
zooming offered benefits in elaboration and recall by means of more complex
story structure and a greater understanding of initiating events and goals.
(UMIACS-TR-2001-87)
(HCIL-TR-2001-25
Single Display Groupware
We discuss a model for supporting collaborative work between people that are
physically close to each other. We call this model Single Display Groupware
(SDG). In this paper, we describe the model, comparing it to more traditional
remote collaboration. We describe the requirements that SDG places on
computer technology, and our understanding of the benefits and costs of SDG
systems. Finally, we describe a prototype SDG system that we built and the
results of a usability test we ran with 60 elementary school children.
Through participant observation, video analysis, program instrumentation, and
an informal survey, we discovered that the SDG approach to collaboration has
strong potential. Children overwhelmingly prefer two mice to one mouse when
collaborating with other children. We identified several collaborative styles
including a dominant partner, independent simultaneous use, a mentor/mentee
relationship, and active collaboration.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-75
Sensing, Storytelling, and Children: Putting Users in Control
Over the past few years, researchers have been exploring possibilities for
how embedded sensors can free children from traditional interaction
strategies with keyboards and mice. In this paper, we consider
sensing-based interactions from a child's perspective. That is, how
children decide to handle sensor data and affect state changes in their
environment. We will present this in the context of our research on
physical interactive storytelling environments for children. The system
architecture will be presented as well as an empirical study of the
technology's use with 18 children, ages 5-6. We will discuss the
challenges and opportunities for kindergarten children to become designers
of their own sensing-based interactions.
UMIACS-TR-2003-16
HCIL-TR-2003-0
Building KidPad: An Application for Children's Collaborative Storytelling
Collaborating in small groups can be beneficial to children's learning and
socializing. However, there is currently little computer support for
children's collaborative activities. This was our motivation for
building KidPad, a collaborative storytelling tool for children. KidPad
provides children with drawing, typing, and hyperlinking capabilities in a
large, two-dimensional canvas. It supports collaboration by accepting
input from multiple mice. In building KidPad, we developed solutions to
problems common to all single-display groupware applications for children:
obtaining input from multiple devices, and using an intuitive user
interface metaphor that can support collaboration. Our solution for
obtaining input from multiple devices was MID, an architecture written in
Java. We addressed the need for an appropriate user interface metaphor byusing the local tools metaphor. This paper describes our work on MID and
local tools in the context of building of KidPad, and aims to provide
developers with valuable insights into how to develop collaborative
applications for children.
(UMIACS-TR-2003-44)
(HCIL-2003-18
Family Calendar Survey
Beginning in late July 2002, we conducted a survey about people's personal and
family calendaring habits. By the end of September, we had over 400 responses,
which are summarized below. The survey was conducted to help inform our work in
designing new technologies for families, motivated in part by our work on the
interLiving project. InterLiving is a 3 year, European Union-funded project
where we work with distributed, multi-generational families as design partners
to create new technologies (see http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/interliving for
details).
The survey was administered from a web page
(https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hilary/survey/survey.htm), and participants were
solicited via a "chain-mail" email approach. We began by sending a request to
fill out a survey to our friends, families, and colleagues. We asked that they
forward the request on to their friends, family and colleagues as well.
While we realize that this was an imperfect approach, we believed that the
respondents would be representative of the users we are initially targeting in
our research on family calendaring and coordination - individuals who are
already making relatively heavy use of computers at home and/or work. The results seem to validate this assumption.
Many of our respondents likely come from the HCI community as the mailing went
to our large lab mailing list. We may have some pollution in the data as a
result of people in the same household (e.g. husband and wife) both filling out
the survey. Despite these issues, the results we got were helpful in eliciting a
number of important findings, namely that people rely on multiple calendars,
many of which are still paper.
(UMIACS-TR-2002-92)
(HCIL-TR-2002-21
The International Children's Digital Library: Viewing Digital Books Online
Reading books plays an important role in children's cognitive and social
development. However, many children do not have access to diverse collections of
books due to the limited resources of their community libraries. We have begun
to address this issue by creating a large-scale digital archive of children's
books, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). In this paper we
discuss our initial efforts in building the ICDL, concentrating on an informal
evaluation of innovative digital book readers.
Keywords
Children, digital libraries, books, book readers, graphical user interfaces.
(UMIACS-TR-2002-09)
(HCIL-TR-2002-03
Accuracy, Target Reentry and Fitts' Law Performance of Preschool Children Using Mice
Several experiments by psychologists and human factors researchers
have shown that when young children execute pointing tasks, they perform at
levels below older children and adults. However, these experiments were not
conducted with the purpose of providing guidelines for the design of graphical
user interfaces. To address this need, we conducted a study to gain a better
understanding of 4 and 5 year-old children's use of mice. We compared the
performance of thirteen 4 year-olds, thirteen 5 year-olds and thirteen young
adults in point-and-click tasks. As expected, we found age had a significant
effect on accuracy, target reentry and Fitts' law's index of performance. We
also found that target size had a significant effect on accuracy and target
reentry. Measuring movement time at four different times (first entering target,
last entering target, pressing button, releasing button) yielded the result tha Fitts' law models children well only for the first time they enter the target.
Another interesting result was that using the adjusted index of difficulty (IDe)
in Fitts' law calculations yielded lower linear regression correlation
coefficients than using the unadjusted index of difficulty (ID). These results
provide valuable guidelines for the design of graphical user interfaces for
young children, in particular when it comes to sizing visual targets. They also
suggest designers should adopt strategies to accommodate users with varying
levels of skill.
(UMIACS-2003-42)
(HCIL-2003-16
A Collaborative Digital Library for Children: A Descriptive Study of Children's Collaborative Behavior and Dialogue
Over the last three years, we have been developing a collaborative digital
library interface where two children can collaborate using multiple mice on a
single computer to access multimedia information concerning animals. This
technology, called "SearchKids" leverages our lab's past work in co-present
collaborative zoomable interfaces for young children. This paper describes the
differences in children's collaborative behavior and dialogue when using two
different software conditions to search for animals in the digital library. In
this study, half the children had to "confirm" their collaborative activities
(e.g., both children had to click on a given area to move to that area). The
other half used an "independent" collaboration technique (e.g., just one mouse
click allows the pair to move to that area). The participants in this study were 98 second and third grade children (ages 7-9 years old) from a suburban public
elementary school in Prince George's County, Maryland. The children were
randomly divided into two groups and paired with a classmate of the same gender.
Each pair was asked to find as many items as possible from a list of 20 items
given a limit of 20 minutes. Sessions were video taped and the first and last
five minutes of each session were coded for discussion type and frequency. The
results of our study showed distinct differences between groups in how children
discussed their shared goals, collaborative tasks, and what outcomes they had in
successfully finding multimedia information in the digital library. These
findings suggest various ways educators might use and technologists might develop new collaborative technologies for learning.
Keywords
Children, Collaboration, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Digital
Libraries, Educational Applications, Single Display Groupware (SDG), SearchKids,
Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs)
(UMIACS-TR-2002-46)
(HCIL-TR-2002-07
Perspectives on gender and product design
International audienceInteractive technologies have a profound mediating effect on the way we obtain and contribute to knowledge, relate to each other and contribute to society. Often, "gender" is not a factor that is explicitly considered in the design of these technologies. When gender is considered, products are often designed with idealised models of gendered "users" -- designed for men, designed for women, designed for boys, designed for girls, or designed for the "average user" who could be male or female. However, the ways in which gender-bias or gender-neutrality are constructed in the design process and the resulting effect on the interactive artifacts that are produced is not well understood. This workshop will address what HCI is currently bringing, and can bring, to the table in addressing this issue
- …