Robots and voice agents are increasingly used in therapy with children. However, little work to date has explored whether and how these tools might support holistic therapy approaches in group play-based settings, which introduce extra considerations compared to individual, task-oriented therapy contexts. In this paper, we describe three multi-week case studies in which an occupational therapist and two speech-language pathologists used a system consisting of a set of e-book stories and a teleoperated voice agent with neurodiverse groups of 5-8-year-old children in group play-based therapy settings. We interviewed therapists, focusing on how the system supported or could better support the social validity of the interventions in terms of goals, procedures, and outcomes. We contribute design implications for tools to support group play-based therapy contexts and explain how social validity can be applied to the evaluation of socially assistive technologies.

Figure 1: Examples of children's drawings and drawing activity setting.

As Computational Thinking (CT) becomes more prevalent in school curricula, it has reached young children, with growing interest in incorporating CT for children in preschool and kindergarten.As more researchers design systems and curricula to teach CT for this age group, there is a need for assessments to better evaluate and compare approaches to teach CT.In this work-in-progress we present activities with 5-6-year-old children from two classrooms.In these classrooms, children participated in educational robotics (ER) activities using a robot that can be programmed through cards placed on the floor for the robot to read as it moves.We developed a test aimed at evaluating children's ability to program the robot, which we administered after the activities.We discuss lessons learned through the administration of the test, both about the ER activities and the test.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss research on extended reality (XR) technologies for children, including identifying risks, opportunities, and ethical guidelines.The workshop builds on prior child-computer interaction research on XR technologies, as well as prior SIGs and workshops focused on ethics.Our goal is to discuss state-of-the art research on XR technologies and outline ethical concerns and future research challenges.

Motivated by ethical concerns, we build upon prior research on adult stakeholder perspectives on the potential uses of augmented reality smart glasses (ARSG) by children by obtaining the perspectives of 3-5-year-old children through play-based design activities. In the activities, children imagined a broad set of experiences with ARSG technologies, such as perceiving a range of objects, imagined beings and places, as well as altering the perception of items in the real world. We also noted that children often expected to perceive the same items as others, which facilitated social activities, but also engaged in selective disclosure when perceiving something more private. The activities we conducted provide insights on likely expectations by this age group for ARSG activities, which should be considered in future designs and ethical reflections, as well as further validation of play-based design as a method to obtain preschool children's ideas about technologies.

To better support children's development of social skills through activities like face-to-face social roleplay, child-computer interaction researchers have employed a variety of strategies, with recent focus on tangible and embodied interactions. This article presents the results of a study conducted in South America focused on supporting face-to-face social roleplay for typically developing preschool children, examining the effect of adding and removing the digital layer of the tangible system. The results of the study provide insights into the challenges of supporting children moving to more complex forms of social roleplay, the diverse impact of adding and removing digital layers of tangible devices across children, and the ways in which what may appear as minor cultural differences can impact the deployment of a system to support social roleplay among preschool children.

Parents balance conflicting concerns and hopes with respect to children's technology use. While prior work documented many of these concerns and hopes, a better understanding of how parents prioritize these considerations with respect to one another could help design technologies for children that better address parents’ needs. We constructed a set of statements based on existing literature. 49 parents of 3-8-year-old children completed a Q-sort activity with these statements, from which we developed three parent personas with distinct attitudes toward technologies aimed at children. We contribute the item set, parent suggestions for additional items, three parent personas, and initial persona validation through a focus group study. We discuss how researchers could 1) use these personas to check for missing perspectives or as aids in participatory design work and 2) use the Q-sort method to create personas based on other populations and contexts.

As part of a larger initiative with the goal of developing ethical guidelines for conducting extended reality (XR) research with children, this paper presents the qualitative analysis of 24 sessions conducted with parents, teachers, medical professionals, and other adult stakeholders with a focus on young children and rural areas. The sessions included discussions of fears and hopes with respect to technologies and children based on prior literature, in-depth consideration of a broad range of potential use scenarios, explanations of how XR headsets work, and use of commercially available headsets. An inductive analysis of notes from sessions resulted in a data structure with the following aggregate dimensions: 1.) privacy and safety; 2.) managing content; 3.) developmental, physical, and behavioral impacts; 4.) broad concerns about emerging technologies; 5.) balancing XR and reality; and 6.) contextual considerations. We include details on each of these aggregate dimensions as well as a grounded model derived from them, providing examples of how these dimensions interact with each other to influence stakeholder perspectives on the ethics of specific uses of XR.

In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children's socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children's face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children's sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children's socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival's support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival's components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context.

Child-agent interaction research has largely focused on automated voice agents, although privacy concerns and quality of interactions serve as a rationale for using teleoperated agents in some settings. Research on neurodivergent children's interactions with voice agents has largely focused on therapy and classroom contexts as opposed to home contexts. We conducted a remote case study via Zoom observing six families with neurodivergent children playing with a tangible, parent-operated voice agent at home for up to eight weeks. We used quantitative measures of agent utilization, qualitative analysis of video recordings, and parent survey responses to identify implications for teleoperation interface design for playful voice agents. Based on our analysis, we argue joint media engagement principles are applicable to a broader set of play activities, and teleoperated agents present affordances and challenges distinct from those of automated agents.

Robotito is an omnidirectional robot designed and developed at Universidad de la República, Uruguay. It is part of a research line in educational robotics aimed at developing free software and open hardware robots for educational use. It was developed in 2018 and has been used in various research projects and educational activities since then. The demo aims to present the robot and its two programming interfaces (tangible and digital interface) to the IDC community to discuss its use in research and education, identify possible extensions and improvements, and encourage international collaborations.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss participatory approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies for children. The workshop builds on prior discussions in the community, which have identified significant challenges in addressing ethical issues related to emerging technologies given that they are still under development, and it is difficult to predict how they may be used. Our goal is to build on the familiarity the community has with participatory methods and apply them to considering the ethics of emerging technologies, thus giving stakeholders, including children, a voice in these considerations.

In a post-lockdown context with significant concerns about children's social skills, it is important for technologies to play a positive role in supporting children across cultures, settings, and backgrounds. The research presented in this work-in-progress is about StoryCarnival, a technology designed to promote creative, social role play among preschool children. We conducted StoryCarnival play sessions for three weeks with a group of 3-4-year-old children in Montevideo, Uruguay, a very different setting from the one where StoryCarnival was designed. We present preliminary results suggesting the activities resulted in a significant increase in children's social play. We also discuss the impact of cultural differences and describe experiences with some features of StoryCarnival that had not previously been used in the field.

In this half-day workshop, we will explore how to co-design technology in inclusive classrooms where children have diverse sensory, motor, cognitive or behavioral abilities. We will discuss barriers and opportunities in co-designing for inclusion, exploring techniques and tools to support learning in a collaborative environment. We encourage researchers, educators, parents, and other stakeholders to participate and provide their expertise and know-how in improving these environments, with an aim to support both inclusion and collaboration; and children’s exploration of their own interests and approaches to learning. We seek to better understand research experiences in these environments, co-design techniques that were successfully used, and what they can teach the broader field of interaction design for children.

Programmable robots designed for preliterate children are one of the options being explored and put into practice for teaching computational thinking skills to children in preschool and kindergarten. Classroom use of these robots may involve use by groups of children due to cost, logistical, and pedagogical reasons. To understand design factors affecting the social use of these robots, we explored the use of three programmable robots with distinctive design characteristics in a kindergarten classroom. Our findings suggest that programmable robot designs that may work well for use by individual children may cause difficulties when shared by groups of children if not all children in the group are able to easily perceive the input (program), output (robot actions), or program state. Based on these design factors we provide recommendations for the design of programmable robots, their evaluation for social use, and for addressing design limitations with support by adult facilitators.

Executive functions (EF), a set of cognitive processes necessary for goal-oriented behavior, are critical for children's school outcomes and often lacking when children arrive in elementary school. One of the most promising interventions to address this gap is Tools of the Mind (ToM), a Vygotskyan approach to early childhood education with a strong emphasis on sociodramatic play. One challenge in implementing this kind of play is supporting children in joining play with their peers. In this paper we present a content analysis of an eight-week evaluation comparing implementing ToM-style play with and without technology supports. We found that one specific aspect of the technology supports, a voice agent, played a crucial role in integrating shy children into sociodramatic play.

There has been a dramatic growth in interactive technology use by children under the age of 5 during the past decade. Despite this growth, children under the age of 5 typically participate only as users or testers in the design process in the overwhelming majority of projects targeting this population presented in key child-computer interaction venues. In this paper we introduce play-based design, an age-appropriate design method to give 3-4-year-old children a voice in the design process. More specifically, we contribute a thorough analysis of the use of existing methods to design technologies for children under the age of 5, a summary of the process that resulted in the development of play-based design, a detailed description of play-based design, a qualitative analysis of our experience implementing play-based design with two groups of children, and a discussion of play-based design's place among other methods, its advantages, and limitations.

Despite its inherent challenges, participatory design (PD) has unique benefits when designing technology for children, especially children with special needs. Researchers have developed a multitude of PD approaches to accommodate specific populations. However, a lack of understanding of the appropriateness of existing approaches across contexts presents a challenge for PD researchers. This workshop will provide an opportunity for PD researchers to exchange and reflect on their experiences of designing with children with special needs. We aim to identify, synthesize and collate PD best practices across contexts and participant groups.

This course will cover child development frameworks from the "classics" that have had a significant impact on interaction design, such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert, to more recent ideas, such as dynamic systems approaches. The materials presented will include concepts such as embodiment, emergence, and plasticity. Hourcade will examine how these frameworks can inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of technologies for children with the goal of promoting healthy development.

While the design of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) has mostly focused on applications for adults, VUIs also provide potential advantages for young children in enabling concurrent interactions with the physical and social world. Current applications for young children focus mostly on media playing, answering questions, and highly-structured activities. There is an opportunity to go beyond these applications by using VUIs to support less structured, developmentally appropriate activities. In this paper, we describe our first step in pursuing this opportunity through an exploration of voice agents to facilitate high-quality social play guided by a partnership with eight 3-4 year old children. During 24 design sessions, we explored making voice agents tangible and enabling children to control what voice agents say. After analyzing the sessions, we learned voice agents could help keep children socially engaged in play and children liked incorporating the agents with the physical aspects of their play. On the other hand, enabling children to control the voice agents caused distractions from play.

Research predicts that 196 million people will be diagnosed with Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) by 2020. People who experience AMD and other vision loss face barriers that affect their Quality of Life (QoL). People experience only modest improvement from technologies (e.g., screen readers, CCTV), tools (e.g., magnifying glasses, tactile buttons), and human help (e.g., friends, blindness organizations). Further, there are issues to accessing these resources based on one's place of residence. To explore these challenges and determine design implications to support people who have experienced vision loss (PVL), we conducted a qualitative semi-structured interview study exploring QoL with 10 PVL. We uncovered themes of supporting creative work, recognizing the impact of one's living in a non-urban setting on QoL, and increasing efficiency at accomplishing tasks. We motivate the inclusion of PVL in the design process because they learned skills while sighted and are now low vision or blind.

Our research explores the development of a novel technology-based prototype to support children and designers during brainstorming, one of the most challenging activities within Participatory Design (PD). This paper describes a proof-of-concept prototype for a tool that aims to empower children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) during PD to maximise their contributions to the design and their own benefits. Preliminary results revealed that the prototype has the potential for reducing anxiety in children with ASD, and supports unlocking their creativity.

We know very little about the use of computers by children under the age of three. While few children in that age range used computers before the advent of smartphones and tablets, these devices have made computers much more accessible to infants and toddlers. In this paper, we provide a window into how these children are using tablets through an analysis of relevant YouTube videos. A majority of children aged 12 to 17 months in the videos in our dataset showed at least moderate ability to use the tablets. For children aged two, it was over 90 percent who displayed at least moderate ability. Our analysis also includes trends in interaction styles, child and device positioning, social aspects, and app genres. These findings point both to opportunities for research and starting points for design.

PURPOSE: To examine the impact of a personal health record (PHR) on medication-use safety among older adults. BACKGROUND: Online PHRs have potential as tools to manage health information. We know little about how to make PHRs accessible for older adults and what effects this will have. METHODS: A PHR was designed and pretested with older adults and tested in a 6-month randomized controlled trial. After completing mailed baseline questionnaires, eligible computer users aged 65 and over were randomized 3:1 to be given access to a PHR (n=802) or serve as a standard care control group (n=273). Follow-up questionnaires measured change from baseline medication use, medication reconciliation behaviors, and medication management problems. RESULTS: Older adults were interested in keeping track of their health and medication information. A majority (55.2%) logged into the PHR and used it, but only 16.1% used it frequently. At follow-up, those randomized to the PHR group were significantly less likely to use multiple non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs-the most common warning generated by the system (viewed by 23% of participants). Compared with low/non-users, high users reported significantly more changes in medication use and improved medication reconciliation behaviors, and recognized significantly more side effects, but there was no difference in use of inappropriate medications or adherence measures. CONCLUSIONS: PHRs can engage older adults for better medication self-management; however, features that motivate continued use will be needed. Longer-term studies of continued users will be required to evaluate the impact of these changes in behavior on patient health outcomes.

The increasing rates of diagnosis for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have brought unprecedented attention to these conditions. Interventions during childhood can increase the likelihood of independent living later in life, but most adults with ASDs who benefited from early intervention do not live independently. There is a need for novel therapies and interventions that can help children with ASDs develop the social skills necessary to live independently. Since the launch of the iPad, there has been a great deal of excitement in the autism community about multitouch tablets and their possible use in interventions. There are hundreds of apps listed as possibly helping children with ASDs, yet there is little empirical evidence that any of them have positive effects. In this paper we present a study on the use of a set of apps from Open Autism Software at an afterschool program for children with ASDs. The apps are designed to naturally encourage positive social interactions through creative, expressive, and collaborative activities. The study compared activities conducted with the apps to similar activities conducted without the apps. We video recorded the activities, and coded children's behavior. We found that during the study children spoke more sentences, had more verbal interactions, and were more physically engaged with the activities when using the apps. We also found that children made more supportive comments during activities conducted with two of the apps. The results suggest the approach to using apps evaluated in this paper can increase positive social interactions in children with ASDs.

We tested PointAssist, software that assists in pointing tasks by detecting difficulty through a sub-movement analysis and triggering help, with adjustments proposed to personalize the assistance provided to individuals with motor impairments. A within-subjects study with sixteen individuals with fine motor skills impairments resulted in statistically significant effects on accuracy using Friedman's test with (Χ2(1)=6.4, p=.011 in favor of personalized PointAssist compared to no assistance.

There is a growing trend in both the academic and private sectors of designing innovative interactive technologies for children. These technologies could be a unique platform for addressing the freedoms and rights of children with special needs. They afford new kinds of support for children with special needs' full participation, both as children and later on as adults, in the public sphere. This workshop highlighted three underexplored themes in designing interactive technologies for children with disabilities, including considerations for participatory design, interactive technologies for children with hearing impairments, and the possibly transformative potential of tangible computing. Some of the future research opportunities and challenges in the areas of deep engagement, interdisciplinarity, individuality, and practicality are discussed.

People are increasingly using wireless mice from across rooms as they use computers as entertainment centers. As a consequence, they often have to point at targets occupying small visual angles. In this note we present the results of a study on pointing performance for targets occupying small visual angles. Our results suggest there is a steep degradation of pointing performance in both accuracy and speed for targets occupying a visual angle below 3 minutes of arc.

Chronic headaches are one of the top five health problems for young children in the United States, negatively affecting their quality of life and learning opportunities. A clear understanding of children's headache characteristics is crucial for delivering appropriate treatment. However, current data collection methods were designed for adults often resulting in insufficient information. In this paper we present a novel method to help children communicate with health care providers and researchers about their headaches. It augments an existing child-centric method called Draw-and-Tell Conversation, which has already been shown to provide more actionable information from children than standard data collection methods. It does so by enabling children to draw their symptoms on a zoomable drawing application, giving them the ability to provide more details and context than on paper. We present a study conducted with nineteen children aged 7 to 12 suggesting that children provided more information about their headaches when using the zoomable drawing application than when drawing on paper. This study provides a rare example of a mobile device used to enhance face-to-face interactions and contributes evidence of a specific benefit of zoomable user interfaces.

Peace is an important value for the human-computer interaction research community, yet it has not resulted in the development of a research sub-community or even a research agenda. In this paper we seek to address this void by first motivating the need for computing research on promoting peace and preventing war. We then review evidence on the factors that affect the likelihood that armed conflict will occur, as well as the aspects involved when individuals make moral decisions on whether or not to support a war. Based on this review, we propose a research agenda, citing research examples from the human-computer interaction literature and discussing new ideas.

The human–computer interaction research community has long been interested in the role of age in the use of computing devices. The current availability of large high-resolution displays and a growing community of older adults who use computers on a regular basis are examples of a changing landscape of users and devices that calls for a reevaluation of what we know about age and computers. This article presents two studies comparing the performance of young and older adults in reading tasks. In our studies, older adults outperformed young adults in terms of reading times and reading comprehension regardless of medium (paper or computer display). In addition, the overlap of confidence intervals for reading times and comprehension by medium suggests participants performed equally well regardless of medium. Both findings are in contrast to results from similar studies from the 1980s and 1990s.

Marginalization threatens basic issues of fairness and equal opportunity for a significant portion of children around the world. In this extended abstract, we frame the problem of marginalization in light of new economic forces and the increasingly ubiquitous role of digital technologies. We then summarize the contributions to the IDC 2010 workshop on Digital Technologies and Marginalized Youth. We conclude by discussing research trends and identifying challenges for future research.

Perceptual, cognitive and motor deficits cause many older adults to have difficulty conducting pointing tasks on computers. Many strategies have been discussed in the HCI community to aid older adults and others in pointing tasks. We present a different approach in PointAssist, software that aids in pointing tasks by analyzing the characteristics of sub-movements, detecting when users have difficulty pointing, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the cursor in those cases. PointAssist is designed to help maintain pointing skills, runs as a background process working with existing software, is not vulnerable to clusters of targets or targets in the way, and does not modify the visual appearance or the feel of user interfaces. There is evidence from a prior study that PointAssist helps young children conduct pointing tasks. In this paper, we present a study evaluating PointAssist with twenty older adults (ages 66-88). The study participants benefited from greater accuracy when using PointAssist, when compared to using the "enhance pointer precision" option in Windows XP. In addition, we provide evidence of correlations between neuropsychological measures, pointing performance, and PointAssist detecting pointing difficulty.

Like literacy itself, access to digital media both reflects and shapes the ways people play and learn, and more generally, how individuals and groups perceive themselves, relate to others, treat things, and occupy space. We see both opportunities and risks in today's infatuation for all things digital. As organizers of the IDC 2009 workshop on "Digital Technologies and Marginalized Youth: Reducing the Gap", our focus is on the empowerment and integration of marginalized youth. We look at how marginalized youth adopt digital media and what's in it for them. We summarize all the accepted position papers in an attempt to draw lessons useful to researchers, educators, and practitioners. To conclude, we draw from Paulo Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed" as a useful framework to rethink some of the prerequisites that may help marginalized youth to find their voices while, at the same time, speaking the tongue of others (in particular those in power). Getting "lost in translations" is what paves the ways to many youngsters social exclusion.

In spite of the increasing amounts of digitized data that will be available to children when they grow up, little attention has been paid toward preparing them for the process of exploring data, researching related information, synthesizing findings, and presenting them to peers. In this paper we present our observations on activities conducted with 10-12 year old children that involved identifying outliers using an information visualization tool, researching the reasons behind the outlying data, and synthesizing and presenting results using a media authoring tool. Our observations suggest children in this age group can make use of information visualization tools designed for a general adult population, but that great difficulties remain in conducting online research, and in integrating data exploration, online research, and presentation of results.

No abstract available.

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist, a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup.

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the nation, and phishing has been a primary tool used for this type of theft. In this paper, we present B-APT, a Bayesian anti-phishing toolbar designed to help users identify phishing Websites and protect their sensitive information. Bayesian filters have shown great performance in content-based spam filtering and we adapt a Bayesian filter to detect phishing attacks in the Web browser. The experimental results show that our toolbar effectively detects phishing sites, and is also efficient in terms of page load delay. Among the phishing sites in our testbed, B-APT detected 100% of phishing sites while IE and Firefox only detected 64% and 55%, respectively. Netcraft and SpoofGuard show better accuracy, 98% and 90%, respectively.

Several experiments have documented how older adults have greater difficulty using input devices than young adults. None of these experiments, however, have provided information on the challenges faced by older adults when using pens to interact with handheld computers. To address this need, we conducted a study comparing the performance of twenty 18–22 year olds, twenty 50–64 year olds, and twenty 65–84 year olds conducting selection and steering tasks. We found that for the most part, older adults were able to complete tasks accurately and efficiently. An exception occurred with the low accuracy rates achieved by 65–84 year old participants when tapping on targets of the same size as the standard radio buttons on the PocketPC. An alternative selection technique we refer to as “touch” enabled 65–84 year olds to select targets significantly more accurately. If tapping to select, making standard-sized targets 50% larger provided 65–84 year olds with similar advantages to switching to “touch” interactions.

When researchers and practitioners conduct research studies or software evaluations where children use mice, it is unclear whether using different mouse sizes would affect the results of these studies and evaluations. To answer this question, we conducted a study with 50 four and five year olds who were randomly assigned to use either small or regular-sized mice. The children in the study had been using regular-sized mice 35 minutes a day, four times a week, for two months previous to the study. In analyzing the results of the study we found no statistically significant differences in accuracy or efficiency between the children who used small and regular-sized mice. We also found no statistically significant differences in accuracy or efficiency between the four and five year olds. The latter result was somewhat surprising given previous research results. In spite of the participants being frequent users of mice, they still had low accuracy rates when pointing and clicking on the smallest target size we tested (16 pixels in diameter). This result provides further evidence of preschool children's need for interactions designed specifically for their developing motor skills.

Several studies have shown that children's performance with input devices in pointing tasks increases with age. However, none of these studies analyzes the sub-movements children make during pointing tasks. This paper analyzes mouse event data from a previous study to compare, at a sub-movement level, the way preschool children and young adults conduct pointing tasks. Results of the analysis show that the children made significantly more sub-movements than the adults. This was caused by children's inaccuracy in the length and direction of their sub-movements. The results also show that most sub-movements were started near the target, and that there was a balance between overshoots and undershoots in these sub-movements. Based on sub-movement data, this paper proposes an algorithm to identify when participants have difficulty pointing. The algorithm provides several advantages such as triggering a precision mode only when users experience difficulty, not requiring information on the location of visual targets, and not requiring information on the direction of mouse motion.

Abstract Collaborating in small groups can be beneficial to children's learning and socializing. However, there is currently little computer support for children's collaborative activities. This was our motivation for building KidPad, a collaborative storytelling tool for children. KidPad provides children with drawing, typing, and hyperlinking capabilities in a large, two‐dimensional canvas. It supports collaboration by accepting input from multiple mice. In building KidPad, we developed solutions to problems common to all single‐display groupware applications for children: using an intuitive user interface metaphor that can support collaboration, and obtaining input from multiple devices. We addressed the need for an appropriate user interface metaphor by using the local tools metaphor. In developing the concept of local tools we learned about the importance of addressing the issue of global modes. Our solution for obtaining input from multiple devices was MID, an architecture written in Java. In building MID, we learned about the importance of building flexible architectures that can support a wide range of applications and devices in a consistent manner, and that are easy to extend and use by programmers. This paper describes our work on local tools and MID in the context of building KidPad, and aims to provide developers with valuable insights into how to develop collaborative applications for children. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Several experiments by psychologists and human factors researchers have shown that when young children execute pointing tasks, they perform at levels below older children and adults. However, these experiments have not provided user interface designers with an understanding of the severity or the nature of the difficulties young children have when using input devices. To address this need, we conducted a study to gain a better understanding of 4 and 5 year-old children's use of mice. We compared the performance of thirteen 4 year-olds, thirteen 5 year-olds and thirteen young adults in point-and-click tasks. Plots of the paths taken by the participants show severe differences between adults' and preschool children's ability to control the mouse. We were not surprised then to find age had a significant effect on accuracy, target reentry, and efficiency. We also found that target size had a significant effect on accuracy and target reentry. Measuring movement time at four different times (first entering target, last entering target, pressing button, releasing button) yielded the result that Fitts' law models children well only up to the time they first enter the target. Overall, we found that the difference between the performance of children and adults was large enough to warrant user interface interactions designed specifically for preschool children. The results additionally suggest that children need the most help once they get close to targets.

Reading books plays an important role in children's cognitive and social development. However, many children do not have access to diverse collections of books due to the limited resources of their community libraries. We have begun to address this issue by creating a large-scale digital archive of children's books, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). In this paper we discuss our initial efforts in building the ICDL, concentrating on the design of innovative digital book readers.

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.