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 I Spy Games for the children to play using CSS and Creative Markup Language (CML) which is an XML-based open standard that is used for defining interactions within a multi-user, multi-touch environment such as the interactive tabletop. We are currently recruiting and running studies!

I am currently leading this project, and it has been an immense learning experience on time and project management! Recruiting and running studies has been a challenge due to needing two children, in a similar age group, to participate at the same time for collaboration. However, this has led us to look at alternate ways of recruiting which will benefit us in other studies.

Stay tuned for our results!

References

1. Woodward, J., Shaw, A., Luc, A., Craig, B., Das, J., Hall Jr, P., Holla, A., Irwin, G., Sikich, D., Brown, Q., Anthony, L. 2016. Characterizing How Interface Complexity Affects Children’s Touchscreen Interactions. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI’2016), San Jose, CA, 7 May 2016, p.1921-1933. [Pdf]

2. Shaw, A. and Anthony, L. 2016. Toward a Systematic Understanding of Children’s Touchscreen Gestures. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2016) , San Jose, CA, 7 May 2016, p.1752-1759. [Pdf and Poster]

3. Anthony, L., Brown, Q., Nias, J., Tate, B., and Mohan, S. 2012. Interaction and Recognition Challenges in Interpreting Children’s Touch and Gesture Input on Mobile Devices. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS’2012), Cambridge, MA, 14 Nov 2012, p.225-234. [Pdf]