Child-Computer Interaction

Content

Chapter 1

Child-computer interaction concerns the study of the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computer systems for children, and major phenomena surrounding them. As children grow up using interactive computer devices more frequently, the way they learn, play, and interact with others is changing. Whether the changes that occur are positive or negative will depend on how these interactions with computers are designed, and how these devices are used. Child-computer interaction is the field focused on how to design interactive technology for children, and how children may make the most out of it in order to have the most positive impact on their development. Child-computer interaction rose out of the work of Seymour Papert and his colleagues on making computer programming accessible to children, and the field of human-computer interaction. It has since counted with significant contributions from other fields including education, developmental psychology, and media studies. Since 2002, the annual Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference has been the epicenter of child-computer interaction research.

As the field has matured, specific approaches have emerged as best practices. These constitute the ten pillars of child-computer interaction: work in interdisciplinary teams, deeply engage with stakeholders, evaluate impact over time, design the ecology not just the technology, make it practical for children’s reality, personalize, be mindful of skill hierarchies, support creativity, augment human connections, and enable open-ended, physical play.

Chapter 2

The field of child development studies about how children change as they grow up. The ideas of Piaget and Vygotsky, which have been highly influential in the child-computer interaction field, form the basis for current research in child development as well. From Piaget comes the concept of adaptation, with children forming knowledge structures as they experience the world. Papert, a pioneer in designing computer technology for children, argues that the best kinds of experiences have children building public artifacts of their interests. Sociocultural approaches influenced by Vygotsky’s ideas put a greater emphasis on the role of society, language, and symbols in development.

More recent approaches to child development emphasize the notion of embodiment, with change occurring through interactions between the brain, the body, and the environment (including other people). They also incorporate the notion of plasticity, or how neural pathways can change. Plasticity tends to be greater at younger ages, meaning that experiences can have a greater impact on development earlier in life, and that there will be more within and between child variability earlier in life.

Interactive technologies can play a role in development by providing children with positive, richer experiences, thus setting a better environment for development. This can involve using computers to motivate children, provide them with personalized experiences of interest they otherwise would not be able to access, and facilitate positive relationships with caretakers, teachers, and peers. The child development literature can assist technology designers through insights on the typical abilities of children at particular ages, and the types of experiences that are more likely to result in healthy changes. It can also provide ideas for the types of skills to develop (e.g., executive skills), and various approaches that can inspire novel interactions with technology.

Chapter 3

Like any other technology, the use of computers can have positive or negative impacts on children. What matters is the type of technology used, the context in which it is used, and the frequency of use. This chapter presented an overview of various risks that can occur when children use computer technology. Risks include physical (e.g., obesity), intellectual (e.g., time spent on games getting in the way of math and reading scores), social (e.g., isolation), emotional (e.g., cyberbullying), and moral issues (e.g., gender stereotyping). Technology designers should take these risks into account to make it less likely that technologies will have a harmful impact on children. Likewise, they can take a more active role in recommending frequency and context of use, for example, making it easier for parents to track the number of time children spend on computer-related activities and how this compares with a healthy frequency of use. Designers can also recommend healthier contexts of technology use that involve parents, caregivers, or other children in computer activities, and that place these activities in locations where responsible adults can easily participate even if it is for brief amounts of time (e.g., in a living room instead of the child’s bedroom). Taking these steps should help reduce risk, and make it more likely that children may benefit from interacting with computers.

Chapter 4

Usability has been widely explored in the human-computer interaction and human factors communities, but for the most part, as it relates to typical adults, with goals that fit business, industry, military, and scientific applications. A challenge when thinking about usability for children is to examine what it means for a technology to be usable by children: what goals are most important? It is also important to remember the needs of children who are atypical in their sensory, physical, or cognitive abilities. Key usability goals will vary based on the technology itself, the user population (i.e., who is going to use the technology), and the context of use. At a high level, technology designers should consider user experience goals: how should it feel to use the technology? Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of optimal experience can be useful in helping identify enjoyable experiences for children that can lead to optimal learning opportunities. At a lower level, more traditional usability goals, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and learnability, can be used to ensure that children are able to learn basic interactions and complete them in a reasonable amount of time with high accuracy.

Chapter 5

Design guidelines provide high-level advice and were originally developed for adult users. However, they also largely apply to children’s user interfaces, with some special considerations. While they do not apply to every project and every circumstance, they are useful in helping steer designs and addressing questions of perceivability, operability, and developmental fit. They involve concepts such as simplicity, mappings, recognition over recall, speaking the user’s language, affordances, constraints, feedback, consistency, personalization, social use, and the ecology of use.

Chapter 6

The choice of appropriate methodologies is critical for successfully designing technologies for children. These methodologies can be applied through all phases of design and development, including identifying needs and establishing requirements, designing the technology, implementing versions of the technology, and evaluating requirements, designs, or prototypes. From the field of software engineering, the main lesson learned is the need for iteration through these development phases, and flexibility in order to accommodate the change. From human-computer interaction, the main lesson learned is the need to engage users, if possible, in every phase of development (usually with the exception of the implementation phase).

Allison Druin classifies children’s engagement at four levels: user, tester, informant, and partner. A majority of the research in child-computer interaction engages children either as informants or partners. In both of these cases, children provide feedback and ideas throughout the development process. As informants, they do so at key points in the design process, while as partners, they join the design team participating equally in all design decisions. Researchers have shared experiences on using a wide variety of methods for each phase in the design process. For obtaining requirements, common activities include observation, interviews, and participatory design activities with children and stakeholders, preferably conducted in the contexts where children are expected to use the technology. Design teams may need to use technology immersion activities to introduce novel technologies to children and stakeholders, in order to better explore their potential use.

For developing design ideas, the most common activities include brainstorming and the development of prototypes of various fidelities. Earlier in the process, prototypes are more likely to be low-fidelity, usually put together from art supplies. These can be designed working together with children, as the materials used are accessible to them. Later on, design teams may develop interactive prototypes to test more detailed interactions. There is a wide variety of approaches to designing prototypes and which to use often depends on the type of technology being designed, the characteristics of the children who will use it, and the context in which it will be used.

Evaluation methods include those used for informal evaluations, expert reviews, usability testing, and field studies. Informal evaluations typically involve feedback from children through activities that usually do not require much planning. A useful method for this purpose is Contextual Inquiry, originally developed for adults, that involves observing children use the technology (or prototype) while taking notes on likes, dislikes, and aspects to change. Expert reviews are based on sets of heuristics, with experienced designers evaluating technology or prototype without input from children. These reviews can be useful to remove any obvious problems before conducting evaluations involving children. Researchers have used methods such as the Structured Expert Evaluation Method (SEEM) and the Semiotic Inspection Method successfully.

Usability testing is a formal method for evaluating technologies or prototypes. It involves selecting a relevant and representative set of tasks for children to conduct with the technology. Design team members ask children to conduct these tasks in a controlled environment, with no distractions, where their actions and speech are recorded. After completing tasks, design team members may interview children or ask them to fill out questionnaires. Much of the research with respect to usability testing involves identifying methods that make it more likely that children will express their opinions about technology. There has also been researched on self-reported measures, such as questionnaires, as well as research on interviewing techniques.

Chapter 7

Much of the research in child-computer interaction has focused on the goal of providing children with an unprecedented ability to be creative and modify their environment. Doing so can help children grow together with their environment with the ability to express ideas and build artifacts. This has been the main motivation behind the design of programming environments for children (as opposed to preparing a workforce of information technology specialists). These programming environments have evolved from being mainly text-based (as in Logo), to visually-oriented languages that require little typing or knowledge of syntax (e.g., Scratch), as well as tangible programming systems oriented at young children. In addition, there is a growing community that is part of the maker culture, providing children with experiences in programming and designing wearables, textiles, and crafts with computing components. Related to these endeavors are tools to help design three-dimensional items.

Storytelling is another way to help children express themselves and develop social and communication skills. Research in this area includes programming environments tailored to storytelling, various multimedia storytelling tools, and tangible systems that enable manipulation of physical artifacts to tell stories. Other creative endeavors supported by computers include tools to author and support music and other performances. These include both graphical user interfaces and whole-body interactive systems. Children’s play may involve creativity as well. Most of the research in this area is in studying what happens to children when they play videogames, and how to design better educational videogames. There are also examples of games designed specifically for families and games that explore the ubiquity of computing, such as alternate reality games. Together, these efforts provide children with novel ways of expression, new approaches to problem-solving, and playful ways to learn.

Chapter 8

Communication and collaboration play a very important role in children’s development. Researchers and commercial ventures have developed technologies to support communication and collaboration at various levels, including face-to-face, remote, and through social networks. Support for face-to-face collaboration began with setups that connected multiple pointing devices to the same computer. These setups provided advantages over setups in which children had to share a computer with only one input device. Researchers have observed similar patterns with touchscreens, where multitouch capabilities lead to better collaboration and communication than touchscreens that can only process one touch at a time. In addition, different patterns of collaboration may arise, depending on how the rules for collaboration are set up, and on the personal characteristics of those communicating or collaborating. There is also a significant amount of research on supporting remote communication. Most of it is intended to help children connect with loved ones who are far away. These efforts have gone beyond videoconferencing applications by, for example, providing additional support for playing or reading books together. Commercially, there are many social networking applications for children, with a variety of features to keep interactions with others safe. At the same time, these often include advertising and may collect marketing data from children. There is still much to learn about the impact of social network use on children’s development. Given the importance of communication and collaboration in children’s development, this is likely to remain an active area of research. The challenge will be to balance the pursuit of new opportunities for remote communication, with enhancing already existing face-to-face communications.

Chapter 9

Internet connectivity has significantly increased the number of content children can access and decreased the effort it takes to access it. At the same time, user interfaces for searching, browsing, organizing, and experiencing content need to be developmentally appropriate. In particular, designers need to be aware of the challenges many children face in typing, spelling, and reading, as well as their search strategy skills. They also need to consider the types of categorizations that make the most sense to children. If possible, user interfaces should incorporate social aspects that can help children learn together and from one another. Once children encounter digital content of interest, it may be useful to provide them with options to annotate the content and share these annotations with peers. One area where children are increasingly encountering digital content is in museums. Research from the child-computer interaction community has contributed guidelines for the design of child-appropriate exhibits, as well as examples of such exhibits. All these guidelines can help steer future media technologies to cater not only to adults but also enable children to access media in a developmentally appropriate manner.

Chapter 10

Learning and educational technologies are among the most active areas of research within child-computer interaction. This research has produced guidelines for approaches to the design of learning technologies, as well as guidelines for specific genres of learning technologies, and for the use of specific types of user interfaces (e.g., tangibles) in educational applications for children. Another area for research has been with respect to strategies to make computers available in schools. Work in this area has included the use of multiple input devices with one computer, low-cost laptops such as those from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, and multitouch tabletop displays. The most popular topics for educational software within the child-computer interaction community mirror those that are most prominent in discussions about education. Hence, most of the research has been in support of reading, writing, mathematics, and science education. Most applications geared at reading aim to make it fun through games. In terms of writing, there have been efforts to support children learning the motor skills necessary for handwriting, as well as research on helping children become organized writers of essays. There are also examples of projects aimed at teaching children second languages. In terms of mathematics, there are two areas where most of the research within the child computer interaction community has focused. One is in the teaching of fractions, which is often a difficult concept for children to understand. The other area has been what is often referred to as cross-platform or transmedia learning, where educational programming in traditional media is complemented with games or other activities available on the web or through mobile devices.

Chapter 11

As computers become ubiquitous in every aspect of our lives, they are also becoming more common in promoting health and helping people with special needs. For children, we see this in technologies that promote healthy habits, such as being physically active and eating well. There are also many examples of technologies used in healthcare, whether they help children learn about a health condition, assist them in managing it, communicate about it, or get support from peers. When it comes to special needs and various impairments, technologies can play a role in providing children access to experiences otherwise not available to them, obtaining support for tasks that are difficult, and helping them develop skills and abilities that require special attention. In terms of physical activity, there has been research in supporting both indoor and outdoor activities. Indoor activities include augmented indoor playgrounds, with Parés’s large interactive slide being a great example. Support for outdoor physical activity includes digitally-augmented interactive playgrounds, as well as games played with handheld devices.

Chapter 12

There are challenges and opportunities that can help set a research agenda for the field of child-computer interaction. They are directly tied to what outcomes we would like to see in children: what kind of adults would we like them to grow up to be? In terms of challenges, the three plagues discussed in this chapter were social isolation, super-consumerism, and inequality. The opportunities included designing technologies that develop with children, aiming for universal impacts, demonstrating positive results and broader impacts, and reflecting on how computer technologies shape children’s cognition. Ultimately, we have choices in the research and work we do. We need to think carefully about these choices because computers are increasingly playing a ubiquitous role in children’s development. What is your vision for the future of humanity? You can play a role in making it happen.

About KSRA

The Kavian Scientific Research Association (KSRA) is a non-profit research organization to provide research / educational services in December 2013. The members of the community had formed a virtual group on the Viber social network. The core of the Kavian Scientific Association was formed with these members as founders. These individuals, led by Professor Siavosh Kaviani, decided to launch a scientific / research association with an emphasis on education.

KSRA research association, as a non-profit research firm, is committed to providing research services in the field of knowledge. The main beneficiaries of this association are public or private knowledge-based companies, students, researchers, researchers, professors, universities, and industrial and semi-industrial centers around the world.

Our main services Based on Education for all Spectrum people in the world. We want to make an integration between researches and educations. We believe education is the main right of Human beings. So our services should be concentrated on inclusive education.

The KSRA team partners with local under-served communities around the world to improve the access to and quality of knowledge based on education, amplify and augment learning programs where they exist, and create new opportunities for e-learning where traditional education systems are lacking or non-existent.

FULL Paper PDF file:

Child-Computer Interaction

Bibliography

author

Juan Pablo Hourcade

Year

2015

Title

Child-Computer Interaction

Paperback

296 pagesChild-Computer Interaction

Publisher

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; First Edition edition (June 17, 2015)

• ISBN-10: 1514397250
• ISBN-13: 978-1514397251

PDF reference and original file: Click here