Olga Lyra

Engaging children in longitudinal behavioral studies through playful technologies

Measuring childrens behaviors and experiences has been one of the core interests of the field of Child-Computer Interaction. However, maintaining childrens engagement in the evaluation process is one of the challenges that researchers need to meet. In this paper we introduce Playful Booth, a system that aimed at engaging children in playful photo taking practices with the goal of capturing their social interactions over prolonged periods of time. We then present a 4-week-long deployment of Playful Booth with a total of seventy children that aimed at addressing three research questions. First, does playful booth create initial engagement on children and does it sustain this engagement over prolonged periods of time? Second, can the deployment be sustained for prolonged periods of time with minimal resources? Last, do behavioral data as captured from playful booth reflect childrens actual social participation in the school community?

Beyond gamification: sociometric technologies that encourage reflection before behavior change

Gamification, the use of game design elements, such as points, levels, badges and achievements, in non-game contexts is a promising approach for encouraging desired behaviors. In this paper we describe our design process and early evaluation of a prototype that sensed childrens social interactions (i.e., physical proximity) in the playground, and attempted to encourage pro-social behaviors through motivational feedback on a public display. We illustrate how we came to realize the potentially detrimental effect of gamification on childrens intrinsic motivation and depth of reflection, and how we attempted to circumvent this through encouraging empathic understanding on children regarding the consequences of their behaviors on others.

Towards persuasive sociometric technologies for inclusive educational settings

With an increasing interest in the social inclusion of children in schools, HCI researchers have proposed technologies that support children at risk of social exclusion in their interactions with peers. However, much of this work has focused on the child at risk of social exclusion, disregarding the fact that social exclusion is a group-phenomenon that often originates in childrens negative stereotyping. In this paper we argue for persuasive sociometric technologies, ones that sense childrens social interactions in real-time, and provide persuasive, just-in-time recommendations to children with the goal of challenging their perceptions of diversity and motivating pro-social behaviors. We report on two studies that aimed at inquiring into childrens practices of social exclusion in school communities as well as whether and how persuasive technologies can stimulate pro-social behaviors and a sense of empathy among them.

ICTD Work, Plus mFeel

This issues Works-In-Progress department has four entries related to the issues theme, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD). They are “Sustainable ICT in Agricultural Value Chains”, “Measuring Social Inclusion in Primary Schools”, “An Architecture for Green Mobile Computation”, and “Improving Communication in Resource-Poor Settings”. A fifth entry, “mFeel: An Affective Mobile System”, covers the mFeel mobile system, which combines context awareness with affective and cognitive techniques.