- Conference Chairs:
- Bo Stjerne Thomsen,
- Lars Elbæk,
- General Chair:
- Ole Sejer Iversen,
- Program Chairs:
- Panos Markopoulos,
- Franca Garzotto,
- Christian Dindler
Welcome to the 13th international conference on Interaction Design & Children, June 1720, 2014, in Aarhus, Denmark. The mission of the IDC conference is to bring together researchers, designers and educators to explore new forms of technology, design and engaged learning among children. The conference incorporates papers, presentations, speakers, workshops, participatory design experiences and discussions on how to create better interactive experiences for children. IDC 2014 offers wideranging program, supporting and facilitating the exchange of ideas within and between all of these communities. The theme of this year's conference is 'Building Tomorrow's Technology Together'.
We live in a global society where digital artefacts have become part of the everyday lives of children. Be it education, sports activities, rehabilitation or play, technology has come to play an important role in the way children relate to their physical, social and cultural surroundings. IDC 2014 invites researchers and practitioners to share their work on how technology affects children's wellbeing and sensemaking in a global context and how children, their parents, teachers and peers can contribute to the design of new technology. We invite researchers and participants to share thoughts on emerging technology, new theoretical perspectives, design methods and approaches, and the understanding of these ideas for the benefit of children's development by questioning how we can build tomorrow's technology together.
In Denmark, the Interaction Design and Children community is forged from research institutions and leading industry partners exploring aspects of children's play, learning and leisure as a foundation for technology design. For the IDC 2014, Aarhus University (AU), The LEGO® Foundation and INTEL have come together to create a venue for researchers and practitioners to work with theoretical, practical and methodological challenges in IDC.
Director of Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University, Paulo Blikstein opens the IDC 2014 conference with a keynote on the designers' mission in the age of ubiquitous technology. According to Paulo Blikstein, we need to design devices, environments, and activities that reflect children's multiple epistemological resources and heuristics. The keynote is followed by two days of 18 full paper presentations, 44 short papers and 21 demos carefully selected through a double blind review process by the IDC program committee.
A new feature of IDC 2014 is a full day interactive forum for all conference attendees around the topic: How does the interaction with digital creative tools support child development? The focus in this session is on how children will develop with digital technologies and the ways we can inspire them to create their own digital tools. Different aspects of this question is addressed in groups prior to the workshop. Professor Marilyn Fleer from Monash University kicks off the session with a keynote on the relations between play and learning in digital environments -- the significance of motives and demands. The keynote is followed by a challenge session facilitated by The LEGO® Foundation and LEGO® employees from different parts of the research and product development groups. The day ends with a closing panel session where topics from the challenge sessions and the IDC 2014 Conference in general are discussed and elaborated by people from research and industry. The interactive workshop day is hosted by The LEGO Foundation in their headquarters in Billund, Denmark. The LEGO Foundation provides IDC 2014 attendees an opportunity to go on an exclusive factory tour as part of the IDC closing program.
CamQuest: design and evaluation of a tablet application for educational use in preschools
This paper describes the design, testing and evaluation of CamQuest, a tablet application intended for educational practice in preschools. CamQuest enables children to search for and photograph geometrical shapes in their surroundings with the tablet ...
Connecting children to nature with technology: sowing the seeds for proenvironmental behaviour
Regular interactions with nature are vital for the development and wellbeing of children and also to build attachment and value for natural environments that potentially promote proenvironmental behaviour in later life. In this paper, we report on a ...
Connected messages: a maker approach to interactive community murals with youth
Connected Messages brings together traditions of engaging youth in designing interactive murals with themes relevant to their lives and new lowcost networking technologies of connecting local groups with global audiences. We describe the design of a ...
Design and evaluation of interactive musical fruit
- Cumhur Erkut,
- Stefania Serafin,
- Jonas Fehr,
- Henrique M.R. Fernandes Figueira,
- Theis B. Hansen,
- Nicholas J. Kirwan,
- Mariam R. Zakarian
In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of a novel, tangible user interface for interaction with sound, to be implemented in a museum setting. Our workinprogress is part of a larger concept for an installation prioritizing a collaborative, ...
Understanding childdefined gestures and children's mental models for touchscreen tabletop interaction
Creating a predefined set of touchscreen gestures that caters to all users and age groups is difficult. To inform the design of intuitive and easy to use gestures specifically for children, we adapted a userdefined gesture study by Wobbrock et al. [12] ...
Jigsaw together: a distributed collaborative game for players with diverse skills and preferences
Presently it is very hard (or even impossible) to allow multiple players with highly diverse characteristics (including age, skills, and preferences) to collaboratively share and play a single jigsaw puzzle. Towards this end, the work presented in this ...
ChiroBot: modularrobotic manipulation via spatial hand gestures
We introduce ChiroBot, a cyberphysical construction kit that allows users to create custom robots out of craft material, easily assemble the robots using joint modules and control them using hand gestures. These handcrafted robots are assembled using ...
Affective communication aid using wearable devices based on biosignals
We propose a novel wearable interface for sharing facial expressions between children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their parents, therapists, and caregivers. The developed interface is capable of recognizing facial expressions based on ...
Screen time for children
When setting out to redevelop its online offerings for children, The Toronto Public Library needed to establish a position on the controversial issue of screen time for children. Given the concerns about the appropriateness, benefits and potential harms ...
Power puppet: science and technology education through puppet building
In this paper, we describe our approach to designing electronic puppetbuilding workshops for middle to early high school students. Power Puppet uses traditional puppet building materials paper and cloth as the main resources, together with simple ...
Motivating children's initiations with novelty and surprise: initial design recommendations for autism
Data from the ECHOES virtual environment (VE) suggests that young children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) may be motivated to initiate repeatedly and positively about novelty and expectationviolations (i.e. discrepancies) in a VE. This is of ...
MakeScape lite: a prototype learning environment for making and design
We describe the development and user testing of an iPad prototype for a new museumbased, interactive tabletop computer game called MakeScape Lite. The game lets learnerswho have no prior formal experience in circuitrybuild virtual circuits in a fantasy ...
StampOn in a museum: helping children's scientific inquiry
This study proposes a mobile support system "Stamp-On" to promote elementary school children's scientific inquiry into museum exhibits. The unique characteristic of Stamp-On is its use of a stamp-shaped interface to connect exhibits and mobile device ...
Children as coresearchers: more than just a roleplay
Coresearch is a method that engages participants in contextual user research by giving them the role of researcher. This method aids to capture their input in the fuzzy front end of the design process. A previous study [5] showed that children can act ...
Considering visual programming environments for documenting physical computing artifacts
In online communities makers share and give feedback on DIY projects. Such feedback could also help novices who get stuck in their projects. However, documenting work in progress is little considered in current tools. We therefore developed a HowTo ...
A study of auti: a socially assistive robotic toy
This paper presents an evaluation of the effectiveness of a new sociallyassistive robot, Auti, in encouraging physical and verbal interactions in children with autism. It aims to encourage positive play behaviors such as gentle speaking and touching, ...
Design with the deaf: do deaf children need their own approach when designing technology?
In this paper, we focus on the question of design of technology for Deaf children, and whether the needs of these children are different from their hearing counterparts in a technology design setting. We present findings from literature together with ...
Applying the CHECk tool to participatory design sessions with children
To encourage ethical practices in participatory design with children the CHECk tool was created. This paper reports on an expert review of the CHECk tool and a validating case study. Four main challenges to the CHECk tool are identified: (1) how to ...
Lowfidelity prototyping tablet applications for children
Children are using computer technology at increasingly younger ages and have become a potential enduser group for tablet applications. The possibilities for incorporating this user group in the early design evaluation with prototyping are still being ...
An OWL in the classroom: development of an interactive storytelling application for preschoolers
In research there is a considerable interest in developing interactive educational systems. However, the typical classroom remains a rather lowtech environment. Allowing teachers to create, adapt and share interactive learning applications might ...
KIKIWAKE: participatory design of language play game for children to promote creative activitybased on recognition of japanese phonology
- Takahiro Nakadai,
- Tomoki Taguchi,
- Ryohei Egusa,
- Miki Namatame,
- Masanori Sugimoto,
- Fusako Kusunoki,
- Etsuji Yamaguchi,
- Shigenori Inagaki,
- Yoshiaki Takeda,
- Hiroshi Mizoguchi
This study proposes a system for supporting the Shotoku Taishi game, which is a language play game that uses the voice of children. The Shotoku Taishi game is a group game in which multiple people presenting a problem vocalize different words at the ...
Exploring challenging group dynamics in participatory design with children
This paper presents a structured way to evaluate challenging group or 'codesign dynamics' in participatory design processes with children. In the form of a critical reflection on a project in which 103 children were involved as design partners, we ...