Our paper presenting what we can learn from children and PE teachers in the formative design of exergames, titled “Toward Exploratory Design with Stakeholders for Understanding Exergame Design” was accepted as a Late-Breaking Work in CHI 2020: the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.  In a previous post from a few years ago, we mentioned that we were analyzing themes that emerged from children’s and PE teachers’ focus group sessions we had run to understand what we could learn from them to aid in the design of exergames. In addition to the focus group sessions, we conducted an in-depth qualitative interview with one PE teacher. The goal of the interview was to elicit design ideas regarding how exergames can be used to motivate children and induce exertion at targeted intensity levels. We compared the themes from the children’s focus group sessions and the PE teacher’s interview to identify overlaps and non-overlaps in their perspectives. In this CHI ’20 Late-Breaking Work, we detail the focus group sessions with children and the interview session with the PE teacher, the overlaps and non-overlaps between children’s and the PE teacher’s perspectives, and the implications of our findings on improving the efficacy of exergames for children. Here is the abstract:

Prior work has explored improving the efficacy of exergames through participatory design with children. Children are not necessarily able to make informed decisions about their fitness, so their perspectives form only half the picture. Adults who are invested in the problem of children’s fitness (e.g., PE teachers) are a valuable missing perspective. As a first step to understanding what we can learn from these stakeholders to aid the design of exergames, we conducted one in-depth interview with a PE teacher and several focus groups with children. Our findings showed that, although both children and the PE teacher like similar game elements, children viewed the elements through the lens of fun while the PE teacher viewed the elements through the lens of effectiveness. Our preliminary findings establish the importance of including such stakeholders in the formative design of exergames.

Interested readers can find the camera-ready version (preprint) here. Initially, I planned to present this paper as a poster in the upcoming CHI 2020 conference taking place in Honolulu, Hawaii from April 25 – April 30. However, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the conference was canceled. As an alternative, I will include a link to the poster around the time of the conference. Please feel free to contact me (aoaloba@ufl.edu) if you have any questions, feedback, or comments on the poster and the paper.

I am a 5th year PhD Student in the INIT lab majoring in Human-Centered Computing (HCC). The FunFitTech project was instrumental in my development as a PhD student. Through this project, I gained experience on how to design focus group and interview questions that can elicit effective responses from participants. I also learned the process of analyzing open-ended responses from participants.