Patrick O'Kelley

Comicboarding: using comics as proxies for participatory design with children

Comicboarding is a participatory design method that uses specially created comic books to generate engaging, productive brainstorming sessions with children. By leveraging known plot formats, interaction styles, and characters in comics, researchers can elicit ideas even from children who are not accustomed to brainstorming, such as those from schools were rote learning is the norm. We conducted an experiment using two variants of the comicboarding methodology with 17 children in China, where traditional participatory design may fail in the face of local cultural practices. The results suggest that comicboarding holds promise for co-design with children.

Designing games to address 'Mute English' among children in China

This paper describes findings and design implications from user research intended to support software to address the Mute English phenomenon. This term refers to the many students in China whose English speaking ability lags far behind that of their reading and listening. Software designs for games are presented as a scalable solution to the problem. Games are a unique way to elicit speech input from children in a personalized educational setting.