Glenda Revelle

Hello, is grandma there? let's read! StoryVisit: family video chat and connected e-books

StoryVisit allows children and long-distance adults to experience a sense of togetherness by reading childrens story books together over a distance. StoryVisit combines video conferencing and connected books: remote grown-up and child readers can see and hear each other, and can also see and control the same e-book. We report on research with 61 families - over 200 users including parents, children and long-distance readers - who used StoryVisit in their homes with a long-distance reader for at least one reading session. In addition, we report qualitative findings regarding nineteen of the families who participated in telephone interviews and four families who were monitored and interviewed by researchers at home. Results show that connected e-book video chat sessions last about five times as long as the typical video chats reported in previous research on families with young children. Moreover, the addition of an animated character increased session lengths by another 50%. StoryVisit usage peaked for families with three year olds, showing that sustained distance interactions with very young children are possible if communication technologies incorporate joint activities that engage children and adults.

Applying Developmental Theory and Research to the Creation of Educational Games.

The field of developmental psychology has produced abundant theory and research about the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development of children; however, to date there has been limited use of this wealth of knowledge by developers creating games for children. This chapter provides an overview of key theoretical observations and research-based insight regarding childrens development and outlines practical implications for their application to game design.

Interactive rich reading: enhanced book reading experience with a conversational agent

In this work, we introduce Interactive Rich Reading, a new enhanced book experience designed to run on smartphones and a tablet device. Interactive Rich Reading is characterized by a video-based conversational agent that asks questions or makes comments about the current page and is specifically designed to promote engagement with the contents of childrens books. We use video compositing techniques to overlay the conversational agent directly over the book contents, creating a magical experience for children by bringing the book to life. We describe technical issues related to enabling this experience on mobile platforms for easier adoption of this technique by other researchers and practitioners.

Pop goes the cell phone: asynchronous messaging for preschoolers

This paper outlines a series of experiments to develop asynchronous messaging systems for preschool aged children. Three unique systems build on a foundational design called Toaster, a jack-in-the box toy with embedded mobile phone that allows children to playfully take and share electronic media. Orange Toaster allows children to create and share self-portraits; Family Toast allows children to browse family photos with physical tokens, and shares their self-portrait reactions with remote family members; Play with Elmo allows children and distant adults to asynchronously share playful video messages. Observations with over 30 children suggest that asynchronous photographic or video messaging with very young children is possible. The results of these studies indicate specific guidelines including (1) childrens UIs need to be playful and immediate (2) UI designs for children should create the here and now feel of real-time interaction, and (3) adults UIs must provide emotionally meaningful feedback from children to engage adult users.

Electric Agents: Combining Collaborative Mobile Augmented Reality and Web-Based Video to Reinvent Interactive Television

Electric Agents is a transmedia game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. A typical-looking educational television show transforms into an interactive game in which children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect vocabulary words that are missing from the show. The players return the words to the show by throwing them back into the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a linear video narrative and an interactive game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play with vocabulary words. We describe the technical implementation to support this collaborative mobile augmented reality experience and report findings from a pilot user study. Results demonstrate patterns of collaborative activity, scaffolded learning, and parasocial relationships that have been linked in previous literature to educational benefits.

Electric agents: fostering sibling joint media engagement through interactive television and augmented reality

Electric Agents is a multi-player game that uses augmented reality on mobile phones to facilitate in-room collaboration and promote joint media engagement around interactive educational television content in the home. Joint media engagement describes collaborative consumption of media and has potential learning benefits. Our research examines whether technology can support joint media engagement, through the use of a series of prototypes that combine handheld augmented reality with web-based video. In pilot testing, sibling play patterns showed evidence of the kind of in-room collaboration and joint media engagement that previous research has shown to facilitate children in making sense of media content.

CHI 2010 special interest group: creating prosocial media for children

Children are introduced to social networking at younger and younger ages through commercially-centered virtual worlds and social gaming sites like Club Penguin, Neopets, and Webkinz. A small and growing subset of these Web 2.0 sites use social media to address prosocial values in children. This Special Interest Group focuses on prosocial media for children, which we define as social media that strive to increase childrens awareness of the lives and needs of others and promote caring about the welfare and well-being of others. Participants in this SIG are invited to join the growing discussion regarding the design and development of childrens prosocial media. Participants will review 3 - 6 short examples, and then break into small groups that will host facilitated discussions about the issues and challenges surrounding design and development of childrens prosocial media. A primary goal of this SIG is to foster the development of a community of researchers and practitioners who are focused on designing and developing prosocial media for children.

Child-Computer Interaction SIG: New Challenges and Opportunities

This SIG will provide child-computer interaction researchers and practitioners an opportunity to discuss four topics that represent new challenges and opportunities for the community. The four areas are: interactive technologies for children under the age of five, technology for inclusion, privacy and information security in the age of the quantified self, and the maker movement.

Electric Agents: combining television and mobile phones for an educational game

Electric Agents is a cross-media game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. In the game Manny, a member of the Pranksters, steals words out of the mouth of Hector, a member of The Electric Company team, and hides them to prevent the story from progressing. Children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect the missing vocabulary words relevant to the show narrative. The players return the stolen words back to the show by throwing the words towards the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a narrative and a game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play and use of specific vocabulary words.

Parent-Child Dialogue with eBooks

Research shows that dialogic reading (adults and children engaging in conversation about the book they are reading) facilitates young childrens language and vocabulary development and success in learning to read. A growing body of research suggests that parent-child dyads engage in less dialogic reading with e-books than with traditional paper books. Previous researchers have suggested this effect may be due to interactive features such as animations and games distracting children from the storyline, or that voice-over narration may compete with parent verbalization. The current study is the first to test this explanation directly, by comparing parent-child reading of a feature-free e-book with reading a paper book. Results showed that even plain e-books with severely limited interactive features led to less parent-child conversation about book content than reading with paper books. It is critical that these results inform parents, educators, developers, and the research community with regard to policy and practice for young childrens media use.