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Digital fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs) are accessible to the public, including children and families. However, a variety of technical skills, tools, and expertise are needed in these spaces, and Fab Lab staff—instructors working there—are in a key role in helping Fab Lab users. There is, however, a lack of research on how these instructors can inspire children's genuine participation in Fab Labs. We analyze the challenges faced by four instructors during two months of Fab Lab workshops with 7–12-year-old children. The children worked in child-only or child-parent groups on informal digital design and fabrication activities. Based on genuine participation principles derived from the literature, we designed our workshops, which included the creation of instructor guideline. At the end, we developed a post-workshop framework in which the instructors provided feedback about their performance and experiences. We provide recommendations to help instructors support children's genuine participation in digital design and fabrication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the different tests proposed in the recent ChildCI framework, 1 1 https://github.com/BiDAlab/ChildCIdb%5fv1. proving its potential for generating a better understanding of children's neuromotor and cognitive development along time, as well as their possible application in other research areas such as e-Health and e-Learning. In particular, we propose a set of over 100 global features related to motor and cognitive aspects of the children interaction with mobile devices, some of them collected and adapted from the literature. Furthermore, we analyse the robustness and discriminative power of the proposed feature set including experimental results for the task of children age group detection based on their motor and cognitive behaviours. Two different scenarios are considered in this study: (i) single-test scenario, and (ii) multiple-test scenario. Results over 93% accuracy are achieved using the publicly available ChildCIdb_v1 database (over 400 children from 18 months to 8 years old), proving the high correlation of children's age with the way they interact with mobile devices. • Proposal of over 100 global features related to motor and cognitive aspects. • Usage of the largest and most diverse public dataset on the topic (ChildCIdb_v1). • Results of over 93% accuracy for the children age group detection task. • It seems to be a relationship between children's age and mobile device interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction approach to avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate children's experiences and engagement; for instance, learning about art is very engaging for children but can bring a number of challenges. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on both pervasive displays and child–computer interaction by reporting the results of a study involving 107 children aged 2 to 10 years. The main purposes of this study were to discover: (1) whether an avatar (movable or immovable) provides interactions that are intuitive for children and therefore help to overcome so-called "affordance blindness"; (2) whether an avatar-based touchless interface makes children's experiences engaging and enjoyable therefore improving recall of content provided through the interaction (learning about art). The study unveiled relevant outcomes in terms of affordance blindness and two-handed interactions. We provide evidence indicating that chronological age influences the style of child–avatar interaction. Finally, it is suggested that avatars could facilitate the development of new effective educational technologies for young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper presents the CoDeT (Collaborative design thinking) approach, developed for co-design settings characterized by a high child-to-adult ratio (ca. 1 adult for 15 to 20 children) such as schools, libraries and maker spaces. • Children often lack a basic understanding of the design process and skills to collaborate productively with peers; CoDeT addresses these challenges by scaffolding collaboration and design thinking. • To scaffold collaboration and design thinking, CoDeT relies on a framework that integrates social interdependence theory and design Thinking; this framework was validated in a case study with 49 children between 9 and 10 years old in two schools. This paper presents the Collaborative Design Thinking (CoDeT) co-design approach, its theoretical framework, and its application in a case study with 49 children aged 9 to 10 in two schools. CoDeT aims to scaffold children's collaboration and design thinking in co-design settings characterised by a high child-to-adult ratio (ca. 1 adult for 15 to 20 children), such as schools, museums and maker spaces. In these settings, children have to work relatively independent from adults who become guides on the side. This can be challenging due to children's limited understanding of the design process and their lack of skills to collaborate productively towards a shared design goal. CoDeT addresses these challenges by integrating principles of Social Interdependence Theory (SIT) and Design Thinking (DT), which together form the theoretical backbone of the approach. CoDeT was first applied in a case study and yielded promising results in terms of children's collaboration and design thinking skills, yet possible improvements were found. The insights of this case study informed the revised version of CoDeT presented at the end of this article, in a what-why-how structure, allowing researchers and practitioners to apply the co-design approach in a wide variety of contexts characterised by high child-to-adult ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Five years of study examining children's touchscreen interactions compared to adults'. • Data has been collected from over 180 people (60 adults, 120 children). • Results focus on findings that are robust to screen size and touchscreen platform. • The set of cumulative design recommendations captures in one place an easy reference for future design. • Open questions in the design of touch-based interactions for children on future platforms. Touchscreen interaction is nearly ubiquitous in today's computing environments. Children have always been a special population of users for new interaction technology: significantly different from adults in their needs, expectations, and abilities, but rarely tailored to in new contexts and on new platforms. Studies of children's touchscreen interaction have been conducted that focus on individual variables that may affect the interaction, but as yet no synthesis of studies replicating similar methodologies in different contexts has been presented. This paper reports the results across five years of focused study in one project aiming to characterize the differences between children's and adults' physical touchscreen interaction behaviors. Six studies were conducted with over 180 people (116 children) to understand how children touch targets and make onscreen gestures. A set of design recommendations that summarizes the findings across the six studies is presented for reference. This paper makes the entire set available for reference in one place and highlights where the findings are generalizable across platforms. These recommendations can inform the design of future touchscreen interfaces for children based on their physical capabilities. Also, this paper outlines the future challenges and open questions that remain for understanding child-computer interaction on touchscreens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) is a growing trend even in the field of creativity. This paper examines which quantitative metrics can be used to comparatively analyse human-computer co-creativity with children. To study this question, 24 schoolchildren of age 10-11 wrote a poem with three co-creative poetry writing processes: a human-computer, a human-human, and a human-human-computer process. The computational participant in the processes was an AI-based application called the Poetry Machine. The children were asked to evaluate their user experience with a 5-point Likert-type questionnaire after each writing process and a comparative questionnaire after finishing all processes. The metrics used in the evaluation were immediate fun, long-term enjoyment, creativity, self-expression, outcome satisfaction, ease of starting and finishing writing, quality of ideas and support from others, and ownership. Significant differences were found in fun, long-term enjoyment, quality of ideas, support, and ownership. The high number of statistically relevant results was enabled by exposing all participants to all writing processes, and the comparative questionnaire. The human-human-computer process was evaluated the best in long-term enjoyment and the human-computer process the weakest in support and idea quality. Creativity and ease of finishing writing turned out to be outlining metrics for the co-creative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In human--computer co-creativity, humans and creative computational algorithms create together. Too often, only the creative algorithms and their outcomes are evaluated when studying these co-creative processes, leaving the human participants to little attention. This paper presents a case study emphasising the human experiences when evaluating the use of a co-creative poetry writing system called the Poetry Machine. The co-creative process was evaluated using seven metrics: Fun, Enjoyment, Expressiveness, Outcome satisfaction, Collaboration, Ease of writing, and Ownership. The metrics were studied in a comparative setting using three co-creation processes: a human--computer, a human--human, and a human--human--computer co-creation process. Twelve pupils of age 10-11 attended the studies in six pairs trying out all the alternative writing processes. The study methods included observation in paired-user testing, questionnaires, and interview. The observations were complemented with analyses of the video recordings of the evaluation sessions. According to statistical analyses, Collaboration was the strongest in human--human--computer co-creation, and weakest in human--computer co-creation. Ownership was just the opposite: weakest in human--human--computer co-creation, and strongest in human--computer co-creation. Other metrics did not produce statistically significant results. In addition to the results, this paper presents the lessons learned in the evaluations with children using the selected methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edith Ackermann was one of the most important scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Child-Computer Interaction. Trained as a developmental psychologist and having worked with Jean Piaget in Switzerland, Ackermann went to MIT in 1985 to join an intrepid group of researchers led by Seymour Papert who were trying to understand how extant theories of development and learning would fare in a world in which children would be surrounded by computational artefacts. For the ensuing three decades, Ackermann would use her unique interdisciplinary expertise in the service of creating new theories of development for this new world, generating cutting-edge research, inspiring a generation of students, and producing seminal papers. This article, making use of literature as well as interviews with colleagues of Edith, discusses Ackermann’s contribution to the field, her life trajectory, impact, and ideas. Edith passed away on 24 December 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linking a symbol to the object it represents is a skill that develops gradually over the first few years of life. However, prior work shows that frequent use of this capacity makes it unintuitive for adults to recognize it as a challenge for young children. We hypothesized that this disconnect would manifest in software interfaces designed for young children, such that applications would embed symbols that the target audience would fail to understand. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 34 preschoolers between the ages of 2 and 5 to assess their ability to work with user interface elements that require symbolic mappings. In particular, we assessed, (1) symbolic progress bars and (2) demonstrations of touch interactions by an on-screen cartoon hand. We found that these techniques are entirely inaccessible for children under 3 and that they require specific design choices to facilitate understanding in children between the ages of 3 and 5. Among a sample of 94 popular apps targeting children in this age range, we found that these symbolic techniques are incorporated into 44% of apps for preschoolers. We further found that embellishing symbolic elements with visual detail, a common practice in apps for preschoolers, increases children׳s cognitive burden and is an additional barrier to performing the symbolic mappings necessary to use these interfaces. We present design alternatives that make these prevalent user interface elements accessible to this user group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is the conventional pedagogical approach for developing the communication skills of children with autism, and research has supported the approach׳s great effectiveness in its communicative utilization of picture cards. Unfortunately, the paper-based approach׳s effectiveness is hampered by the time-consuming and complex preparation process of manually creating and managing these picture cards for use between the children and their caregivers. This paper presents iCAN, a tablet-based system that adopts the successful aspects of the traditional PECS approach while incorporating advantageous features such as support for digital, visualization, and voice capabilities, improved portability due to its smaller form factor on a tablet, and image-capturing capabilities for expanding the flexibility of content creation. We deployed our system onto eleven children participants – whom are diagnosed with moderate to severe autism – and their primary caregivers over a span of four weeks, and our results demonstrated that iCAN reduced content-preparation time by over 70% while also enhancing children with autism׳s willingness to learn and interact with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In next-generation classrooms and educational environments, interactive technologies such as surface computing, natural gesture interfaces, and mobile devices will enable new means of motivating and engaging students in active learning. Our foundational studies provide a corpus of over 10,000 touch interactions and nearly 7,000 gestures collected from nearly 70 adults and children aged 7 years and above, which can help us understand the characteristics of children's interactions in these modalities and how they differ from adults. Based on these data, we identify key design and implementation challenges of supporting children's touch and gesture interactions, and we suggest ways to address them. For example, we find children have more trouble successfully acquiring onscreen targets and having their gestures recognized than do adults, especially the youngest age group (7-10 years old). The contributions of this work provide a foundation that will enable touch-based interactive educational apps that increase student success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers spend considerable amount of time keeping students with autism 'on task' giving away prompts and rewards and maintaining a detailed record of students' progress during the object discrimination training. We hypothesize that tangible computing, in particular smart objects, could help teachers cope with the problems faced during the object discrimination training of students with autism. In this paper, we describe design principles for smart objects to support the object discrimination training and present several example prototypes. First, we present the design and implementation of 'Things that think' (T3), a smart device that converts traditional objects into smart objects that promote interactivity with a playful and engaging interaction, and are capable of the automatic recording of students' progress. Then, we present four T3 smart objects assembled in a board. The results of a 7-week deployment study of the use of such smart objects in three classrooms of students with autism ( n = 25, 7 teachers and 18 students with autism) demonstrate T3 smart objects reduce the workload of teachers, ease the record-keeping and increase its reliability, and reduce students' behavioral problems while improving their cognitive efficacy. We close discussing directions for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tablets with touch-screens, multi-touch interfaces and various sensors are becoming increasingly common. More and more schools are testing them with their pupils in the hope of bringing pedagogic benefits. Thanks to this new type of device, new sets of interactions can be thought of. Many studies have tested user reception of innovative interactions. At the present time, pedagogic benefits can be evaluated to resolve 3D geometry problems. In this paper, we used an already accepted set of interactions to manage rotation of solids and we evaluated its pedagogic benefit on a test group of learners aged 9 to 15. We propose a protocol based on mathematics didactic and pedagogy. We compared the set of interactions with classic sheets of paper and solids. Our results show that using our set of interactions increase significantly good answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children represent an increasingly relevant target group of the game industry. Nevertheless, they are rarely involved in development processes. This article introduces child-centered game development (CCGD) approaches for the game design within the context of the school. Therefore, suitable HCI approaches from user-centered and participatory design as well as educational principles and approaches were used as a foundation. The CCGD approaches illustrate how to guide the involvement and participation of children aged 10–14 years in school classes within the development process of games. Approaches for the analysis, conceptualization, and design phases were developed and applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The automatic recognition of user’s communicative style within a spoken dialog system framework, including the affective aspects, has received increased attention in the past few years. For dialog systems, it is important to know not only what was said but also how something was communicated, so that the system can engage the user in a richer and more natural interaction. This paper addresses the problem of automatically detecting “frustration”, “politeness”, and “neutral” attitudes from a child’s speech communication cues, elicited in spontaneous dialog interactions with computer characters. Several information sources such as acoustic, lexical, and contextual features, as well as, their combinations are used for this purpose. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog corpus of 103 children, 7–14 years of age, playing a voice activated computer game. Three-way classification experiments, as well as, pairwise classification between polite vs. others and frustrated vs. others were performed. Experimental results show that lexical information has more discriminative power than acoustic and contextual cues for detection of politeness, whereas context and acoustic features perform best for frustration detection. Furthermore, the fusion of acoustic, lexical and contextual information provided significantly better classification results. Results also showed that classification performance varies with age and gender. Specifically, for the “politeness” detection task, higher classification accuracy was achieved for females and 10–11 years-olds, compared to males and other age groups, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study evaluates and compares the suitability for child–computer interaction (CCI, the branch within human–computer interaction focused on interactive computer systems for children) of two devices: a standard computer mouse and the ENLAZA interface, a head mouse that measures the user's head posture using an inertial sensor. A multidirectional pointing task was used to assess the motor performance and the users' ability to learn such a task. The evaluation was based on the interpretation of the metrics derived from Fitts' law. Ten children aged between 6 and 8 participated in this study. Participants performed a series of pre- and post-training tests for both input devices. After the experiments, data were analyzed and statistically compared. The results show that Fitts' law can be used to detect changes in the learning process and assess the level of psychomotor development (by comparing the performance of adults and children). In addition, meaningful differences between the fine motor control (hand) and the gross motor control (head) were found by comparing the results of the interaction using the two devices. These findings suggest that Fitts' law metrics offer a reliable and objective way of measuring the progress of physical training or therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]