Category: MTAGIC

Former INIT Lab undergraduate research assistant Julia Woodward is first-author on a recent paper on her dissertation work that appeared at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2022), held in person in New Orleans in May of 2022. For this paper, Julia brought together several threads from her previous research projects […]

In 2020, the INIT Lab collaborated with the Ruiz HCI lab, in particular lead Ph.D. student author Julia Woodward, on a study to understand how well Fitts’ Law and FFitts’ Law applies to children’s touching behaviors on touchscreen devices. This study ended up being published in a paper entitled “Examining Fitts’ and FFitts’ Law Models […]

For five years, the INIT lab (and our past and present collaborators!) was engaged in an NSF-funded research project to study physical dimensions of children’s touchscreen interaction use, e.g., what happens when they try to acquire onscreen targets or make onscreen gestures. The project, called “Mobile Touch and Gesture Interaction for Children,” or “MTAGIC” (magic) […]

We are proud to be able to say that our lab has had a paper accepted to the upcoming ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) 2018 conference! This paper presents an analysis of children interacting around a large touchscreen tabletop display, in particular examining some previously proposed design recommendations for how to support […]

And now for something a little different! The INIT Lab has long been conducting research on how children’s physical capabilities (e.g., motor skills development) affects their interactions with touchscreen devices like iPads and smartphones. Other researchers, like Alexis Hiniker and her former advisor Julie A. Kientz, both at the University of Washington in the DUB […]

We are pleased to share that our paper “Using Co-Design to Examine How Children Conceptualize Intelligent Interfaces” has been accepted to the upcoming ACM SIGCHI 2018 conference, to be held in April in Montreal, Canada! The first author is our own former undergraduate star, Julia Woodward, who is now a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing […]

In our previous post on this project, we discussed getting design input from children for designing intelligent interfaces such as speech, gesture, and touch. We are collaborating with Jason Yip from University of Washington on this project. Jason is the director of KidsTeam UW, where he is co-designing new technologies with children and families. We […]

In a previous post on the MTAGIC project, we presented results of a study that found that interface complexity (simple, abstract interface vs. complex interface) affected children’s performance of some touch interactions and did not affect gesture interactions on smartphone devices. Recently, we have been extending this project to identify the differences in how children […]

We are currently extending our previous research [1,2,3] on children’s touch and gesture interaction patterns to interactive tabletop computers as well as looking at the collaboration between children on the multi-touch tabletop. We are looking at how to scaffold positive collaboration on the tabletop with children ages 5 to 10. To research collaboration we created […]

As seen in our previous research [1, 2, 3], recognition of children’s gesture input is not as accurate as it is for adults, and children have more difficulty with touch interactions. These findings show that intelligent user interfaces such as touch, gesture, and speech can pose challenges for children because the system is not always […]