Brendan Cassidy

CHECk: a tool to inform and encourage ethical practice in participatory design with children

When working with children in participatory design activities ethical questions arise that are not always considered in a standard ethics review. This paper highlights five challenges around the ethics of the value of design and the ethics of the childrens participation and presents a new tool, CHECk that deals with three of these challenges by virtue of two checklists that are designed to challenge researchers in CCI and HCI to critically consider the reasons for involving children in design projects and to examine how best to describe design activities in order that children can better consent to participate.

Children's Interaction with Mobile Touch-Screen Devices: Experiences and Guidelines for Design

In this article, the authors investigate the usability of mobile touch-screen devices for children. This is a growing area, and as such there is currently a lack of definitive guidelines for mobile device designers. This article reports two studies that investigated input methods for touch-screens with children aged 7-10, concentrating on the interaction between the child and the devices. In the first study, a range of devices were observed in use, in order to gather overall impressions of interaction styles and user experience. In the second study, a more controlled comparison between stylus and finger input is made. The article concludes by offering a set of general design guidelines for the design of mobile devices for children.

Understanding the fidelity effect when evaluating games with children

There have been a number of studies that have compared evaluation results from prototypes of different fidelities but very few of these are with children. This paper reports a comparative study of three prototypes ranging from low fidelity to high fidelity within the context of mobile games, using a between subject design with 37 participants aged 7 to 9. The children played a matching game on either an iPad, a paper prototype using screen shots of the actual game or a sketched version. Observational data was captured to establish the usability problems, and two tools from the Fun Toolkit were used to measure user experience. The results showed that there was little difference for user experience between the three prototypes and very few usability problems were unique to a specific prototype. The contribution of this paper is that children using low-fidelity prototypes can effectively evaluate games of this genre and style.

Designing textual password systems for children

This paper describes two studies that looked at passwords for children. The first examined what children knew about the creation of textual passwords and then a second, follow on study, investigated the passwords that children chose to use. The two studies show that children have some understanding of how to make a good textual password but that the passwords they use are often in contradiction to their own knowledge of best practice. Based on the findings from these two studies, the authors propose three key design principles for systems that require textual passwords for children and where no alternative is available.

Participatory design of wearable augmented reality display elements for children at play

This paper presents the findings of a low-fidelity participatory design activity for the design of wearable Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for children at play. The aims of the research were to gain insights into the different types of augmentations children find engaging and useful in different play contexts. The papers contribution is both the method used, and the insights gained from the design session. Using the method outlined the paper, young children were able to successfully understand the concept of augmented reality and communicate their ideas for the design of AR play experiences without first seeing a concrete example of wearable display technology. The children designed for three distinct types of play experience, Constructive play, Role play and Creative play. The children used the design packs assembled by the researchers to express their ideas. These were then coded by four experienced Child Computer Interaction (CCI) researchers to analyze the artifacts created by the children. We identify 10 design themes for AR artifacts in play and discuss the frequency of artifacts found within these themes across the different types of play investigated.

Crowdsourcing Ideas for Augmented Reality Museum Experiences with Children

When the target audience is children, the human–computer interaction community has firmly established the benefits of involving children throughout the design process. Participatory design methods with children have been used successfully for the design of learning. Within the context of museums, there have been shown to be benefits in children designing interactive experiences for themselves and their peers. We therefore conjecture that children can contribute towards the design of engaging learning materials for museums. With space being a premium within museums, the possibility of using augmented reality (AR) with existing exhibits is appealing. With the increased availability of off-the-shelf wearable devices, research in the field of wearable computing has grown in recent years but only a small portion of this research is dedicated to the design of wearable technologies for children. This chapter presents a study that uses specially constructed storyboards to crowdsource ideas for a VR exhibit within a museum in which children were enabled to design low-fidelity interfaces and interactions within an AR context. The storyboards that the children produced were analysed to determine whether the children understood the concept of AR. In addition, the drawings were analysed to establish the ideas generated, the feasibility of the implementation of proposed technology, the interaction methods and, finally, the educational merit. We critically reflect on the ideas proposed by the children and the methodology for generating ideas relating to museum experiences.