# Interactive Play and Learning for Children

Authors: Adrian Cheok; Hiroshi Ishii; Junichi Osada; Owen Noel Newton Fernando; Tim Merritt
Journal: Advances in Human-Computer Interaction
 (2008)

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## Body

## 1. Introduction

One of  the most socially and
culturally beneficial uses of human computer  interaction research is enhancing play
and learning for children. It is very important to understand the needs of
children and craft visionary interactive systems designed to enhance education
and entertainment. In this special issue, we can study papers that provide
visions and glimpses into the future of human computer interaction for children's
play and learning.Since the research findings of Piaget
[1], educators have valued the activity of play as an essential stage for the
development of the human mind. Through trial and error and a “learn by doing
approach,” children internalize concepts of complex physics, abstract logic, and
social rules among others. Caillois [2] described man as essentially an
organism that requires play. The positive psychology approach would also
agree that this is especially critical in promoting the human to not only develop but truly thrive. It is
very important to understand the needs of children and craft visionary
interactive systems designed to enhance education and entertainment and provide
those experiences and activities which allow the child to emerge as an empowered learner with
confidence and inspiration.


## 2. Guide to the Special Issue

The focus of this special issue is to
provide visions and glimpses into the future of human computer interaction for
children's play and learning. It also discusses achievements on different
technical and theoretical development of interactive play and learning for
children. The special issue received an overwhelming number of submissions from
researchers around the world focusing on various topics ranging from
user-centered design to advanced technical developments. Considering
originality, technical competence, user evaluation, and balance of topics,
thirteen papers were accepted for the special issue. If we look at all of
the papers as one body of works, it makes sense to divide them into three
chapters according to the main focus. There were four focused on designing
for children with disabilities, five focused on methodological issues of design
for children, and four focused on specific technologies focused on supporting
children in learning through play activities.


### 2.1. Design for Disabilities

Apart from being a most worthy
application of research, it is a very well accepted strategy to focus on the
design for people with disabilities as a way to improve designs for all
users. By designing for users with specific needs, there are usability
issues and needs that emerge which face the designer which are then
transferrable to all users regardless of their abilities.The paper by van Rijn and Stappers
presents guidelines for designers of interactive systems for children with
autism. These were developed during their LINKX project in order to
design a language-learning toy for autistic children. Theoretical and
practical implications for each guideline are presented through the experiences
of the prototype development process so that other designers can use them to
inform their design decisions.The paper by Tuominen et
al. presents research of their PROAGENTS multimodal learning environment, which supports blind children
in explorative learning experiences with astronomy. The system utilizes haptic
and auditive interaction techniques in the proactive agents that support and
guide children, deepen their explorations, and discover the central concepts
and other phenomena.The paper by Hengeveld et al. presents research focused on children with multiple disabilities
(e.g., both a cognitive and a motor disability) and stimulating the adult-child
communication to decrease functional limitations. LinguaBytes is presented,
which stimulates language development through interactive and adaptive play and
learning in an environment incorporating tangible objects and multimedia
content. The research is based on interactive storytelling and anchored
instruction. An outline of the development of the LinguaBytes play and
learning environment from the earliest studies, 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 of various
abilities including the vocally disabled. Their system utilizes
linguistic analysis instead of the signal processing techniques used in other
existing concatenative TTS systems. The paper presents the results of a user
study, informing their development and giving insights to the challenges and
needs of such a system.


### 2.2. Methodology

The advancement of the methodological
tools for the field of HCI research and for designers in general represents a
fundamental way of sharing knowledge and the blueprints for successful
outcomes. Papers in this section
recognized the creativity of the child as a designer, user-centered design, and
the development of new multimodal environments.The paper by Nousiainen and
Kankaanranta presents their research experiences in user-centered and
participatory design while in collaboration with elementary school children in
the design of learning environments, based on three projects and requirements
gathering techniques. Through this
research, issues related to design collaboration with children emerged,
especially in terms of the children's feeling of ownership over the final outcome. The children's contribution yielded outcomes
which were useful in informing the design of the user interface as well as the
contents of the learning environments.The paper by Abeele and Zaman
presents theoretical framework and practical case for designing likeable
interactive media applications for preschoolers. In this article, they have
demonstrated how the uses and gratifications paradigm together with expectancy-value
theory could fill in one of the blanks in designing likeable applications for
preschoolers via the research project CuTI (Cuddle Toy Interface). The CuTI
project aims at revealing those particular user gratifications and design
attributes that are important to support playful behavior and fun activities of
preschoolers in the home environment.The paper entitled “Child-centered evaluation: broadening
the child/designer dyad” by Pardo
et al. discusses challenges in literal interpretation of user-centered
design for children. They have explored the certain hard-to-reach or
difficult-to-interpret situations such as evaluation of educational software
intended to be used by children. The paper also argues that the added value
that teachers can bring to the evaluation of educational software can improve the
diagnostic power of the evaluation and its sensitivity to pedagogical issues.The paper by Motoyoshi et al. proposes a novel strategy
of designing play equipments and detailed explanation of the strategy through
an example of a designing process of playing environment where the players' usage
of the play equipments cannot
be foreseen. This enables designers to interpret the playing environment
as an information channel in terms of channel theory, which is also an
appropriate loose constraint for designing a play environment.The paper by Birchfield et al. introduces theoretical
research from HCI and Education that reveals a convergence of trends focused on
embodiment, multimodality, and composition. Authors argued that there is great
potential for truly transformative work that aligns HCI and education research,
and posit that there is an important opportunity to advance this effort through
the full integration of the three themes into a theoretical and technological
framework for learning.


### 2.3. Specific Applications and Technology

Four of the papers clearly introduced innovative uses of
technology in the creation of interactive systems for learning and play. From the systems which inspire creativity to
the systems which assist in the mastery of games of skill, there are lessons to
be learned and inspiration to be drawn from these cutting edge systems.The paper entitled “BlogWall: social and cultural interaction
for children” by Cheok et
al. is an extension of the existing text messaging to a new level of
self-expression and public communication, combining visual art and poetry. By
selecting proper elements, the application can be effectively used to build
awareness among children about diverse cultural elements of humans as global
beings while they interact and play with the system. The results of users'
studies indicated that the application has a high level of social and
engagement aspects.The paper by Kerdvibulvech and Saito proposes a vision-based
method for tracking guitar fingering position and actions by guitar players. A
new framework for tracking colored finger markers is presented which integrates
a Bayesian classifier into particle filters. The resulting application made from this system assists guitar learners
by allowing them to automatically identify if they are using the correct chords
required by the musical piece. This
brings HCI research and applies engineering solutions to enhance the creativity
and learning of guitar playing.The paper by Uematsu and Saito presents visually enhanced
sports entertainment applications: AR baseball presentation system and interactive
AR bowling system. Main advantage of these applications is that they do not
require any special device such as positioning sensors or a high-performance PC
because applications can be run on the tabletop in the real 3D world only with
a web camera and a handheld monitor connected to a PC. Demonstration showed
that children really enjoyed these applications because their actions in the
real world affect the virtual world.The paper by Uchiyama and Saito presents a pool supporting
system with a camera-mounted handheld display based on augmented reality
technology. Main objective of this research is to estimate and analyze the
distribution of balls and to present visual aids without special equipment such
as a magnetic sensor or artificial markers. Children are able to capture a pool
table from an arbitrary viewpoint and see supporting information and ball
behavior which are drawn on the captured images through the display. Results of
the experiment showed that the accuracy of estimated ball positions is enough
for analysis of ball arrangement.


## 2.1. Design for Disabilities

Apart from being a most worthy
application of research, it is a very well accepted strategy to focus on the
design for people with disabilities as a way to improve designs for all
users. By designing for users with specific needs, there are usability
issues and needs that emerge which face the designer which are then
transferrable to all users regardless of their abilities.The paper by van Rijn and Stappers
presents guidelines for designers of interactive systems for children with
autism. These were developed during their LINKX project in order to
design a language-learning toy for autistic children. Theoretical and
practical implications for each guideline are presented through the experiences
of the prototype development process so that other designers can use them to
inform their design decisions.The paper by Tuominen et
al. presents research of their PROAGENTS multimodal learning environment, which supports blind children
in explorative learning experiences with astronomy. The system utilizes haptic
and auditive interaction techniques in the proactive agents that support and
guide children, deepen their explorations, and discover the central concepts
and other phenomena.The paper by Hengeveld et al. presents research focused on children with multiple disabilities
(e.g., both a cognitive and a motor disability) and stimulating the adult-child
communication to decrease functional limitations. LinguaBytes is presented,
which stimulates language development through interactive and adaptive play and
learning in an environment incorporating tangible objects and multimedia
content. The research is based on interactive storytelling and anchored
instruction. An outline of the development of the LinguaBytes play and
learning environment from the earliest studies, 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 of various
abilities including the vocally disabled. Their system utilizes
linguistic analysis instead of the signal processing techniques used in other
existing concatenative TTS systems. The paper presents the results of a user
study, informing their development and giving insights to the challenges and
needs of such a system.


## 2.2. Methodology

The advancement of the methodological
tools for the field of HCI research and for designers in general represents a
fundamental way of sharing knowledge and the blueprints for successful
outcomes. Papers in this section
recognized the creativity of the child as a designer, user-centered design, and
the development of new multimodal environments.The paper by Nousiainen and
Kankaanranta presents their research experiences in user-centered and
participatory design while in collaboration with elementary school children in
the design of learning environments, based on three projects and requirements
gathering techniques. Through this
research, issues related to design collaboration with children emerged,
especially in terms of the children's feeling of ownership over the final outcome. The children's contribution yielded outcomes
which were useful in informing the design of the user interface as well as the
contents of the learning environments.The paper by Abeele and Zaman
presents theoretical framework and practical case for designing likeable
interactive media applications for preschoolers. In this article, they have
demonstrated how the uses and gratifications paradigm together with expectancy-value
theory could fill in one of the blanks in designing likeable applications for
preschoolers via the research project CuTI (Cuddle Toy Interface). The CuTI
project aims at revealing those particular user gratifications and design
attributes that are important to support playful behavior and fun activities of
preschoolers in the home environment.The paper entitled “Child-centered evaluation: broadening
the child/designer dyad” by Pardo
et al. discusses challenges in literal interpretation of user-centered
design for children. They have explored the certain hard-to-reach or
difficult-to-interpret situations such as evaluation of educational software
intended to be used by children. The paper also argues that the added value
that teachers can bring to the evaluation of educational software can improve the
diagnostic power of the evaluation and its sensitivity to pedagogical issues.The paper by Motoyoshi et al. proposes a novel strategy
of designing play equipments and detailed explanation of the strategy through
an example of a designing process of playing environment where the players' usage
of the play equipments cannot
be foreseen. This enables designers to interpret the playing environment
as an information channel in terms of channel theory, which is also an
appropriate loose constraint for designing a play environment.The paper by Birchfield et al. introduces theoretical
research from HCI and Education that reveals a convergence of trends focused on
embodiment, multimodality, and composition. Authors argued that there is great
potential for truly transformative work that aligns HCI and education research,
and posit that there is an important opportunity to advance this effort through
the full integration of the three themes into a theoretical and technological
framework for learning.


## 2.3. Specific Applications and Technology

Four of the papers clearly introduced innovative uses of
technology in the creation of interactive systems for learning and play. From the systems which inspire creativity to
the systems which assist in the mastery of games of skill, there are lessons to
be learned and inspiration to be drawn from these cutting edge systems.The paper entitled “BlogWall: social and cultural interaction
for children” by Cheok et
al. is an extension of the existing text messaging to a new level of
self-expression and public communication, combining visual art and poetry. By
selecting proper elements, the application can be effectively used to build
awareness among children about diverse cultural elements of humans as global
beings while they interact and play with the system. The results of users'
studies indicated that the application has a high level of social and
engagement aspects.The paper by Kerdvibulvech and Saito proposes a vision-based
method for tracking guitar fingering position and actions by guitar players. A
new framework for tracking colored finger markers is presented which integrates
a Bayesian classifier into particle filters. The resulting application made from this system assists guitar learners
by allowing them to automatically identify if they are using the correct chords
required by the musical piece. This
brings HCI research and applies engineering solutions to enhance the creativity
and learning of guitar playing.The paper by Uematsu and Saito presents visually enhanced
sports entertainment applications: AR baseball presentation system and interactive
AR bowling system. Main advantage of these applications is that they do not
require any special device such as positioning sensors or a high-performance PC
because applications can be run on the tabletop in the real 3D world only with
a web camera and a handheld monitor connected to a PC. Demonstration showed
that children really enjoyed these applications because their actions in the
real world affect the virtual world.The paper by Uchiyama and Saito presents a pool supporting
system with a camera-mounted handheld display based on augmented reality
technology. Main objective of this research is to estimate and analyze the
distribution of balls and to present visual aids without special equipment such
as a magnetic sensor or artificial markers. Children are able to capture a pool
table from an arbitrary viewpoint and see supporting information and ball
behavior which are drawn on the captured images through the display. Results of
the experiment showed that the accuracy of estimated ball positions is enough
for analysis of ball arrangement.


## 3. Conclusion

We appreciate the opportunity to
gather together a fine collection of academic papers which present a picture of
the current landscape of the design of interactive and digital systems
supporting learning and play for children. We hope that this special issue will
inspire the researchers of today and tomorrow to create a better world
promoting the learning and play activities of children of all ages.Adrian David CheokHiroshi IshiiJunichi OsadaOwen Noel Newton FernandoTim Merritt



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*Source: 954013-2009-01-25.xml*