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 effective collaboration in this context. INIT Lab former student Julia Woodward conducted this study with her co-authors while she was an undergraduate research assistant in our lab. She is now a Human-Centered Computing (HCC) PhD student working with Dr. Jaime Ruiz in the Ruiz HCI Lab.
Here is the abstract:
Prior work has shown that children exhibit negative collaborative behaviors, such as blocking others’ access to objects, when collaborating on interactive tabletop computers. We implemented previous design recommendations, namely separate physical territories and activity roles, which had been recommended to decrease these negative collaborative behaviors. We developed a multi-touch “I-Spy” picture searching application with separate territory partitions and activity roles. We conducted a deep qualitative analysis of how six pairs of children, ages 6 to 10, interacted with the application. Our analysis revealed that the collaboration styles differed for each pair, both in regards to the interaction with the task and with each other. Several pairs exhibited negative physical and verbal collaborative behaviors, such as nudging each other out of the way. Based on our analysis, we suggest that it is important for a collaborative task to offer equal opportunities for interaction, but it may not be necessary to strive for complete equity of collaboration. We examine the applicability of prior design guidelines and suggest open questions for future research to inform the design of tabletop applications to support collaboration for children.
You can download the camera-ready PDF here. Julia will be presenting the paper in November in Jersey City, NJ.