Editorial InteractivePlayandLearningforChildrendownloads.hindawi.com/journals/ahci/2008/954013.pdfThe paper by van Rijn and Stappers presents guidelines for designers of interactive

Hindawi Publishing CorporationAdvances in Human-Computer InteractionVolume 2008, Article ID 954013, 3 pagesdoi:10.1155/2008/954013

Editorial

Interactive Play and Learning for Children

Adrian Cheok,1, 2 Hiroshi Ishii,3 Junichi Osada,4

Owen Noel Newton Fernando,1 and Tim Merritt1

1 Mixed Reality Lab, Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI), National University of Singapore,21 Lower Kent Ridge Road, Singapore 119077

2 Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University, Kanagawa-ken 223-8522, Japan3 MIT Media Lab, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA4 NEC Design, Ltd., Shinagawa-Ku, Tokyo 141-0031, Japan

Correspondence should be addressed to Adrian Cheok, [email protected]

Received 24 November 2008; Accepted 24 November 2008

Copyright © 2008 Adrian Cheok et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

One of the most socially and culturally beneficial uses ofhuman computer interaction research is enhancing play andlearning for children. It is very important to understandthe needs of children and craft visionary interactive systemsdesigned to enhance education and entertainment. In thisspecial issue, we can study papers that provide visions andglimpses into the future of human computer interaction forchildren’s play and learning.

Since the research findings of Piaget [1], educatorshave valued the activity of play as an essential stage forthe development of the human mind. Through trial anderror and a “learn by doing approach,” children internalizeconcepts of complex physics, abstract logic, and social rulesamong others. Caillois [2] described man as essentiallyan organism that requires play. The positive psychologyapproach would also agree that this is especially criticalin promoting the human to not only develop but trulythrive. It is very important to understand the needs ofchildren and craft visionary interactive systems designed toenhance education and entertainment and provide thoseexperiences and activities which allow the child to emerge asan empowered learner with confidence and inspiration.

2. Guide to the Special Issue

The focus of this special issue is to provide visions andglimpses into the future of human computer interaction

for children’s play and learning. It also discusses achieve-ments on different technical and theoretical developmentof interactive play and learning for children. The specialissue received an overwhelming number of submissions fromresearchers around the world focusing on various topicsranging from user-centered design to advanced technicaldevelopments. Considering originality, technical compe-tence, user evaluation, and balance of topics, thirteen paperswere accepted for the special issue. If we look at all of thepapers as one body of works, it makes sense to divide theminto three chapters according to the main focus. There werefour focused on designing for children with disabilities, fivefocused on methodological issues of design for children, andfour focused on specific technologies focused on supportingchildren in learning through play activities.

2.1. Design for Disabilities

Apart from being a most worthy application of research, it isa very well accepted strategy to focus on the design for peoplewith disabilities as a way to improve designs for all users.By designing for users with specific needs, there are usabilityissues and needs that emerge which face the designer whichare then transferrable to all users regardless of their abilities.

The paper by van Rijn and Stappers presents guidelinesfor designers of interactive systems for children with autism.These were developed during their LINKX project in orderto design a language-learning toy for autistic children.Theoretical and practical implications for each guidelineare presented through the experiences of the prototype

2 Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

development process so that other designers can use themto inform their design decisions.

The paper by Tuominen et al. presents research of theirPROAGENTS multimodal learning environment, whichsupports blind children in explorative learning experienceswith astronomy. The system utilizes haptic and auditiveinteraction techniques in the proactive agents that supportand guide children, deepen their explorations, and discoverthe central concepts and other phenomena.

The paper by Hengeveld et al. presents research focusedon children with multiple disabilities (e.g., both a cognitiveand a motor disability) and stimulating the adult-child com-munication to decrease functional limitations. LinguaBytes ispresented, which stimulates language development throughinteractive and adaptive play and learning in an environmentincorporating tangible objects and multimedia content. Theresearch is based on interactive storytelling and anchoredinstruction. An outline of the development of the Lin-guaBytes play and learning environment from the earlieststudies, up to the current prototype, CLICK-IT, is provided.

The paper by Jacob and Mythili has developed a text-to-speech (TTS) system specifically targeting children ofvarious abilities including the vocally disabled. Their systemutilizes linguistic analysis instead of the signal processingtechniques used in other existing concatenative TTS systems.The paper presents the results of a user study, informing theirdevelopment and giving insights to the challenges and needsof such a system.

2.2. Methodology

The advancement of the methodological tools for the fieldof HCI research and for designers in general represents afundamental way of sharing knowledge and the blueprintsfor successful outcomes. Papers in this section recognized thecreativity of the child as a designer, user-centered design, andthe development of new multimodal environments.

The paper by Nousiainen and Kankaanranta presentstheir research experiences in user-centered and participatorydesign while in collaboration with elementary school chil-dren in the design of learning environments, based on threeprojects and requirements gathering techniques. Throughthis research, issues related to design collaboration withchildren emerged, especially in terms of the children’s feelingof ownership over the final outcome. The children’s contri-bution yielded outcomes which were useful in informing thedesign of the user interface as well as the contents of thelearning environments.

The paper by Abeele and Zaman presents theoreticalframework and practical case for designing likeable interac-tive media applications for preschoolers. In this article, theyhave demonstrated how the uses and gratifications paradigmtogether with expectancy-value theory could fill in one of theblanks in designing likeable applications for preschoolers viathe research project CuTI (Cuddle Toy Interface). The CuTIproject aims at revealing those particular user gratificationsand design attributes that are important to support playfulbehavior and fun activities of preschoolers in the homeenvironment.

The paper entitled “Child-centered evaluation: broad-ening the child/designer dyad” by Pardo et al. discusseschallenges in literal interpretation of user-centered designfor children. They have explored the certain hard-to-reachor difficult-to-interpret situations such as evaluation ofeducational software intended to be used by children. Thepaper also argues that the added value that teachers canbring to the evaluation of educational software can improvethe diagnostic power of the evaluation and its sensitivity topedagogical issues.

The paper by Motoyoshi et al. proposes a novel strategyof designing play equipments and detailed explanation of thestrategy through an example of a designing process of playingenvironment where the players’ usage of the play equipmentscannot be foreseen. This enables designers to interpret theplaying environment as an information channel in terms ofchannel theory, which is also an appropriate loose constraintfor designing a play environment.

The paper by Birchfield et al. introduces theoreticalresearch from HCI and Education that reveals a convergenceof trends focused on embodiment, multimodality, andcomposition. Authors argued that there is great potentialfor truly transformative work that aligns HCI and educationresearch, and posit that there is an important opportunity toadvance this effort through the full integration of the threethemes into a theoretical and technological framework forlearning.

2.3. Specific Applications and Technology

Four of the papers clearly introduced innovative uses oftechnology in the creation of interactive systems for learningand play. From the systems which inspire creativity to thesystems which assist in the mastery of games of skill, thereare lessons to be learned and inspiration to be drawn fromthese cutting edge systems.

The paper entitled “BlogWall: social and cultural inter-action for children” by Cheok et al. is an extension of theexisting text messaging to a new level of self-expression andpublic communication, combining visual art and poetry. Byselecting proper elements, the application can be effectivelyused to build awareness among children about diversecultural elements of humans as global beings while theyinteract and play with the system. The results of users’ studiesindicated that the application has a high level of social andengagement aspects.

The paper by Kerdvibulvech and Saito proposes a vision-based method for tracking guitar fingering position andactions by guitar players. A new framework for tracking col-ored finger markers is presented which integrates a Bayesianclassifier into particle filters. The resulting application madefrom this system assists guitar learners by allowing them toautomatically identify if they are using the correct chordsrequired by the musical piece. This brings HCI research andapplies engineering solutions to enhance the creativity andlearning of guitar playing.

The paper by Uematsu and Saito presents visuallyenhanced sports entertainment applications: AR baseballpresentation system and interactive AR bowling system.

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction 3

Main advantage of these applications is that they do notrequire any special device such as positioning sensors or ahigh-performance PC because applications can be run onthe tabletop in the real 3D world only with a web cameraand a handheld monitor connected to a PC. Demonstra-tion showed that children really enjoyed these applicationsbecause their actions in the real world affect the virtualworld.

The paper by Uchiyama and Saito presents a poolsupporting system with a camera-mounted handheld displaybased on augmented reality technology. Main objective ofthis research is to estimate and analyze the distribution ofballs and to present visual aids without special equipmentsuch as a magnetic sensor or artificial markers. Children areable to capture a pool table from an arbitrary viewpointand see supporting information and ball behavior which aredrawn on the captured images through the display. Resultsof the experiment showed that the accuracy of estimated ballpositions is enough for analysis of ball arrangement.

3. Conclusion

We appreciate the opportunity to gather together a finecollection of academic papers which present a picture ofthe current landscape of the design of interactive and digitalsystems supporting learning and play for children. We hopethat this special issue will inspire the researchers of today andtomorrow to create a better world promoting the learningand play activities of children of all ages.

Adrian David CheokHiroshi Ishii

Junichi OsadaOwen Noel Newton Fernando

Tim Merritt

References

[1] J. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in The Child, Basic Books,New York, NY, USA, 1954, translated by Margaret Cook.

[2] R. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, Free Press of Glencoe, NewYork, NY, USA, 1961.

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Editorial InteractivePlayandLearningforChildrendownloads.hindawi.com/journals/ahci/2008/954013.pdfThe paper by van Rijn and Stappers presents guidelines for designers of interactive