Magnitude understanding, an understudied topic in Child-Computer Interaction, entails making nonsymbolic ‘more-less’ comparisons that influence young children's later math and academic achievements. To support this ability, designing tangible user interfaces (TUIs) demands considering many facets, ranging from elements within the physical world to the digital design components. This multifaceted activity brings many design decisions often not reflected in research. Therefore, we present this reflection via our research through design process in developing a vital design element, the physical form. We share our (i) physical object design criteria elicitation for magnitude understanding, (ii) hands-on making process, and (iii) preliminary studies with children engaging with objects. With our insights obtained through these steps, we project how this physical object-initiated research inspires the TUI in the upcoming steps and present design takeaways for CCI researchers.

Early development of fine motor skills is a critical milestone for children, which also helps the formation and maturation of other developmental areas like language development. While toys and daily artefacts could support children's fine motor skills, parents play a profound role in monitoring their developmental progress. Although there are several products to support fine motor development and help parents monitor their children's progress, the literature lacks a source that might inform the design of such products. As the first step of a bigger research project, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 parents to gather their insights into and expectations of such supportive products. We designed a sensor-embedded toy concept, ANIMO, aimed at supporting the fine motor development of 7 to 24-month-old children and assisting parents in tracking their children's developmental progress via a mobile app. We showed this concept to parents during interviews to facilitate the insight elicitation process. We present ANIMO, three themes summarizing parents’ insights and expectations into products supporting fine motor development along with implications for their design.

Recent developmental studies state that nonsymbolic number representation (i.e., more-less comparisons) is important for math development, and children's judgment about such non-numerical magnitudes can be affected by sensory properties (i.e., volume, space). Yet, to our knowledge, there are no tangible based systems for training this math concept. Building on theories of cognition and learning, we developed MaR-T, a projector-camera setup. This paper is a step towards investigating the effects of projection-based mixed-reality (MR) system with tangibles on nonsymbolic number representation of 3- to 5-year-old children. We present our user studies with a total of 14 participants, conducted to observe their interaction with the setup and the possible effects of our design on learning. The results indicate that MaR-T can provide active, engaging, and social learning, and our insights can inspire other interaction design and education studies.

This video illustrates the large-scale experiment of the L2TOR project that will be presented at the HRI 2019 conference. The experiment aimed to investigate how 192 Dutch 5-year-old children could learn 34 English words from a NAO robot in 7 lessons. The experiment compared 4 conditions: 1) robot using iconic gestures, 2) robot without iconic gestures, 3) tablet only, and 4) a control group. The results revealed that children could learn more English words in all experimental conditions compared to the control group. The three experimental conditions did not show any significant differences regarding the learning outcomes.

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of a robot's iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3) the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot's iconic gestures on learning gains.

A child's early math development can stem from interactions with the physical world. Accordingly, current tangible interaction studies focus on preschool children's formal (symbolic) mathematics, i.e. number knowledge. However, recent developmental studies stress the importance of nonsymbolic number representation in math learning, i.e. understanding quantity relations without counting(more/less). To our knowledge, there are no tangible systems based on this math concept. We developed an initial tangible based mixed-reality(MR) setup with a small tabletop projector and depth camera. Our goal was observing children's interaction with the setup to guide our further design process towards developing nonsymbolic math training. In this paper, we present our observations from sessions with four 3-to-5 year old children and discuss their meaning for future work. Initial clues show that our MR setup leads to exploratory and mindful interactions, which might be generalizable to other tangible MR systems for child education and could inspire interaction design studies.

Programming has become an essential subject for today's education curriculum and as a result, the importance of creating the right environments to teach is increasing. For such environments, featuring tangible tools enhances creativity and collaboration. However, due to their high prices, current tangible tools are not reachable by most of the students. We developed Code Notes as a low-cost, attainable and tangible tool aimed to motivate children to support programming education. Code Notes is comprised of an Android app and code-cardboards to teach the basic concepts in programming. We continue to develop the platform with insights gained from children. This paper shares the design phases of Code Notes and observations from our two-month programming project. We also presented some future concepts of Code Notes that offer an active and embodied interaction with the teaching material.

To date, developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account at the early stages of technology design. Bekker and Antle [6] created developmentally situated design (DSD) cards as a design tool to inform children's technology designers about children's development starting from 5 years of age. In this paper, we describe how we customized DSD cards for a specific developmental skill (i.e., spatial learning) of children between 2- and 4-year-olds for tangible interaction design. The cards were evaluated after a user study in which 19 participants from different backgrounds used the cards in three design workshops. Our analysis of observational notes and online survey identify and discuss how specific card features support or limit use by our participants. We draw on our findings to set forth design considerations and possible refinements that make age specific knowledge about very young children's spatial learning to inform technologies based on tangible interaction.

During collocated meetings, the spontaneous need for information, called opportunistic search, might arise while conversing. However, using smartphones to look up information might be disruptive, disrespectful or even embarrassing in social contexts. We propose an alternative instrument for this practice: Glance Mug, a touch-sensitive mug prototype that listens to the conversation and displays browsable content-driven results on its inner screen. We organized 15 pairs of one-to-one meetings between students to gather user reflections. The user study revealed that the mug has the potential for supporting instant search and affords sufficient subtlety to conceal user actions. Yet, it provoked some anxiety for the users in maintaining eye contact with their partners. Our main contributions are the context-aware mug concept tested in a real-life setting and the analysis through Hornecker and Buur's Tangible Interaction Framework that discusses its design space, and its impact on the users and social interaction.

Hand-specific on-skin (HSoS) gestures are a trending interaction modality yet there is a gap in the field regarding users' preferences about these gestures. Thus, we conducted a user-elicitation study collecting 957 gestures from 19 participants for 26 commands. Results indicate that (1) users use one hand as a reference object, (2) load different meanings to different parts of the hand, (3) give importance to hand-properties rather than the skin properties and (4) hands can turn into self-interfaces. Moreover, according to users' subjective evaluations, (5) exclusive gestures are less tiring than the intuitive ones. We present users' subjective evaluations regarding these and present a 33-element taxonomy to categorize them. Furthermore, we present two user-defined gesture sets; the intuitive set including users' first choices and natural-feeling gestures, and the exclusive set which includes more creative gestures indigenous to this modality. Our findings can inspire and guide designers and developers of HSoS.

This proposed project aims to develop a research-driven interactive product that facilitates spatial skills of preschoolers. Here, we present the preliminary qualitative results of a user study with the paper prototype of Fungram, merging physical tangram pieces on the screen within a narrative context. A pilot study was conducted with eight children between the ages of 25 and 48 months, who were presented tangible tangram pieces along with two sets of papers with and without narrative context. Our preliminary qualitative data indicates that narrative context helps children's coherence of abstract figures and triggers rotation of geometric tangram pieces. This study provide insights about children's user needs and action strategies within the proposed use scenario with graspable puzzle pieces related to screen interaction at this age range. We suggest that transmedia play expand opportunities for children to employ their spatial skills in different settings.

We observe an increasing interest on usage of full-body interaction in games. However, human-to-human social touch interaction has not been implemented as a sophisticated gaming apparatus. To address this, we designed the Sensation, a device for detecting touch patterns between players, and introduce the game, Shape Destroy, which is a collaborative game designed to be played with social touch. To understand if usage of social touch has a meaningful contribution to the overall player experience in collaborative games we conducted a user study with 30 participants. Participants played the same game using i) the Sensation and ii) a gamepad, and completed a set of questionnaires aimed at measuring the immersion levels. As a result, the collected data and our observations indicated an increase in general, shared, ludic and affective involvement with significant differences. Thus, human-to-human touch can be considered a promising control method for collaborative physical games.