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 perform target touching and gesture drawing tasks when interacting using different input devices. We so far have conducted a user study and have been analyzing and documenting our findings. We are particularly interested in how similar or different our results were to the previous results from the MTAGIC project. We are currently in the process of writing a paper that provides detailed results, and discussions of our findings.

This project started as a class project for a research methods class. Working on this project has been an informative, challenging, and a good learning experience. This project helped broaden my understanding on the topics taught in the class such as descriptive statistics, and experimental designs. Furthermore, it has helped enhance my skills in performing statistical analysis on data from different types of experimental design. A major challenge I faced while analyzing the data was trying to figure out the right anova analysis syntax in R for mixed, repeated-measure experimental design; which was our experimental design, and this project has enabled me to challenge myself in learning to understand and overcome problems. I plan to apply the knowledge gained when performing statistical analysis on data in future research projects.