Other Projects

Touchscreen Interaction Design for Children

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Nikita Soni
Aishat Aloba
Kristen Morga

Details

Decades of research in child-computer interaction have defined empirically grounded interface design guidelines for better meeting the cognitive, physical, and socio-emotional needs of children. Yet many apps for kids don’t follow or even contradict these recommendations. Why does this happen? We aimed to characterize the gap that exists between research and practice, specifically for touchscreen interface design for children. A meta-analysis led to the TIDRC (“tide-rock”) conceptual framework for touchscreen interaction design for children ages 2 to 11.

We also included an empirical analysis of 50 free iPad apps for children to demonstrate how the framework can be used to assess whether research-based design guidelines are being implemented in practice. The TIDRC framework guide as a one-sheet download is available to download here for researchers and interface design practitioners.

Publications

Soni, Nikita, Aloba, Aishat, Morga, Kristen S., Wisniewski, Pamela J., and Anthony, Lisa. 2019. A Framework of Touchscreen Interaction Design Recommendations for Children (TIDRC): Characterizing the Gap between Research Evidence and Design Practice. In Proceedings of the Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC’19), Boise, ID, USA, June 12-15, to appear. [PDF]

This work is partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant Awards #IIS-1552598. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect these agencies’ views.

Bridging Languages and Learning Computing

Jeremiah Blanchard

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune

Details

While finishing his Ph.D. degree, Jeremiah studied how students can more effectively learn programming languages, especially in introductory computing courses.

Jeremiah wrote several tools and was published at the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). Jeremiah is now an instructional faculty member at the University of Florida in the Dept of Engineering Education.

Tools:

• Pencil Code, an environment that provides blocks-based and text representations of production languages, and in which users can switch between blocks and text modes in real time.
• Amphibian

Blanchard, J.J. 2020. Building Bridges: Dual-Modality Instruction and Introductory Programming Coursework. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida. May 2020. [PDF]

Publications

Refereed Conference Papers

1. Blanchard, J., Gardner-McCune, C., and Anthony, L. 2019. Effects of Code Representation on Student Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Programming. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages & Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC’2019), Memphis, TN, USA, October 14-18, 2019, Pages 127-131. [PDF]
2. J. Blanchard, C. Gardner-McCune, L. Anthony. 2016. Hybrid environments: a bridge from blocks to text. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER2017). ACM Press, New York, NY. 295-296.

Refereed Conference Posters
3. Blanchard, J., Gardner-McCune, C., Anthony, L. 2018. How Perceptions of Programming Differ in Children with and without Prior Experience. Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’2018), Baltimore, Maryland, February 21 – 24, 2018, pages 1099-1099. [PDF]

Refereed Workshop Papers
4.  J. Blanchard, C. Gardner-McCune, L. Anthony. 2015. Bridging Educational Programming and Production Languages. Paper for the “Every Child a Coder” workshop, ACM Conference on Interaction and Design and Children (IDC’2015), Boston, MA, 21 June 2015. [PDF]

Smart and Trustworthy Cyberspace project

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Aishat Aloba
Aaliyah Richlen
Kim Suarez
Yu-Peng Chen

in collaboration with:
Dr. Jaime Ruiz
Sarah Morrison-Smith

Details

In-home privacy, security, and authentication is another example of technology that has been deployed with little thought given to children or multi-person households. And as our future environments get smarter — with dynamic sensing and multimodal input — we still don’t know how to design these experiences for multi-generational contexts.

We started by asking how multimodal interactions could be used seamlessly for identification, similar to personal biometrics like fingerprints and facial recognition.

We also explored how children might use smart home speakers and how the speakers’ speech recognition might fail on their input.

Future work could use these findings to consider diverse user groups’ perspectives and challenges when using emerging interaction technologies like gesture, speech, and motion.

Publications

1. Kim, M.K., Druga, S., Esmaeili, S., Woodward, J., Shaw, A., Jain, A., Langham, J., Hollingshead, K., Lovato, S.B., Beneteau, E., Ruiz, J., Anthony, L., and Hiniker, A. 2022. Examining Voice Assistants in the Context of Children’s Speech. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction. Volume 34, December 2022, Article no.100540, 13 pp. [PDF].

2. Morrison-Smith, S., Aloba, A., Lu, H., Benda, B., Esmaeili, S., Flores, G., Smith, J., Soni, N., Wang, I., Joy, R., Woodard, D.L., Ruiz, J., and Anthony, L. 2020. MMGatorAuth: A Novel Multimodal Dataset for Authentication Interactions in Gesture and Voice. Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ’20), October 25–29, 2020, Virtual event, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages, to appear. [PDF]

This work is partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant Awards #IIS-XXXXXXX and Discover, Inc. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect these agencies’ views.

Whole-Body Interaction for Children

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Aishat Aloba
Alex Shaw
Julia Woodward
Amanda Castonguay

Details

This project established and characterized clearly that children and adults make body movements differently enough to confuse whole-body interaction systems such as the Microsoft Kinect. We investigated the intersection of understanding what the differences are, and how the differences actually impacted interaction. We collected the first dataset of child and adult motions published and made available as KinderGator.

We ran the first explicit study of the perception of child motion compared to analogous adult motion, finding that people can generally tell if a motion (masked for physical signals) is being performed by a child or an adult, and even more so for dynamic motions such as walking and running

What cues helped people tell? We analyzed walking and running motions for temporal (dependent on time) and spatial (dependent on distance) features from literature on studying gait (how people walk). Our findings showed that children differ from adults only in terms of temporal features: children generally complete walking and running motions in less time and with higher energy compared to adults.

Future work could use these findings to design better recognition algorithms better attuned to children’s motion, and to use them in the design of whole-body interaction games like our prototype FunFitTech.

Read more at the full project website!

Publications

Journal Articles

1. Jain, E., Anthony, L., Aloba, A., Castonguay, A., Cuba, I., Shaw, A., and Woodward, J. 2016. Is the motion of a child perceivably different from the motion of an adult? ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, Volume 13, Issue 4, Article 22, July 2016. [PDF]

Refereed Conference Papers

2. Aloba, A., Luc, A., Woodward,J., Dong, Y., Zhang, R., Jain, E., and Anthony, L. 2019. Quantifying Differences between Child and Adult Motion Based on Gait Features. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction , Orlando, FL, USA, July 29-31, Pages 385-402. Springer, Cham. [PDF]
3. Aloba, A., Flores, G., Woodward, J., Shaw, A., Castonguay, A., Cuba, I., Dong, Y., Jain, E.and Anthony, L. 2018. Kinder-Gator: The UF Kinect Database of Child and Adult Motion. EUROGRAPHICS Proceedings, Delft, Netherlands, April 16-20, 2018, 4 pages. [PDF]
4. Dong, Y., Paryani, S., Rana, N., Aloba, A., Anthony, L., Jain, E. 2017. Adult2Child: dynamic scaling laws to create child-like motion. MIG’17 , November 8–10, 2017, Barcelona, Spain, pages 1-10. [PDF]

This work is partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant Awards #IIS-1552598. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect these agencies’ views.

Whole-Body Fitness Games for Children and Adults

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Aishat Aloba
Gianne Flores
Ian Mayne
Jaida Langham
Zari McFadden
Nikita Dagar
Samyukta Ganesan
Sydney Richardson

Details

If we can recognize children (and adults’) whole body movements — like walking, jumping, lunging, and clapping — then we can design interactive experiences that this new technology enables. We spent some time designing exergames first for older adults, and then for children, that can sustain their motivation to exercise in the long-term. The games and the recognition algorithms could not be designed the same way.

Through early design interviews, focus groups, and contextual observation with local kids and physical education (PE) teachers, we considered how we can design exergames that might appeal to children for a long period and maintain physical activity efficacy. Our findings showed ways the same user need may be contextualized very differently depending on the design lens. For example, providing feedback may be required, but from the child’s perspective — a “fun” lens — this idea points to visual design and rewards. From the teacher’s perspective, the lens may be focused more on proper form and expert guidance.

Future work could use our findings to inform further design probes into the space of exercise games for children. We recommend always including multiple stakeholders, not only children and teachers, but also parents, sport coaches, and in the design process.

This project’s seed was a similar project Dr. Anthony and Samyukta Ganesan at UMBC investigated ways to design and develop exergames for older adults by taking into account their attitudes towards exercise, staying active, technology, and games. The complete original UMBC work can be found here.

Publications

1. Aloba, A., Flores, G., Langham, J., McFadden, Z., Bell, J., Dagar, N., Esmaeili, S., and Anthony, L. 2020. Toward Exploratory Design with Stakeholders for Understanding Exergame Design. In Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘2020). Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, USA, April 25-20, Pages 1–8. [PDF]

2. Ganesan, S. and Anthony, L. 2012. Using the Kinect to Encourage Older Adults to Exercise: A Prototype. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2012), Austin, TX, 5 May 2012, p.2297-2302. [Pdf] [Poster]

Summer 2015 FunFitTech Project Demo

INIT Kinect Games for Exercise Demo

You can find more videos on the project here.

This work is partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant Awards #IIS-1552598. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect these agencies’ views.

Game Design For Science

Dr. Lisa Anthony
Aishat Aloba
Gabriel Coleman
Triton Ong
Shan Yan

Details

Invasive species are non-native species that cause ecological, environmental harm to the environment and/or harm to people. To teach children about invasive species and the effect of these species on the environment, the University of Florida Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants (UF IFAS) developed a board game called Lakeville. Deployed in multiple Florida science classrooms, evaluations showed the game helped kids improve their knowledge of invasive species. To investigate how to develop a version of Lakeville accessible to children outside the classroom, we prototyped and tested a mobile strategy game version called Lakeville Protectors. This project was in collaboration with UF Digital Worlds Institute and the UF IFAS.

Publications

Aloba, A., Coleman, G., Ong, T., Yan, S., Suvajdzic, M., Albrecht, D., Anthony, L. 2017. From Board Game to Digital Game: Designing a Mobile Game for Children to Learn About Invasive Species. CHI PLAY’17 Extended Abstracts, October 15–18, 2017, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pages 375-382. [PDF]