Learning social skills is an important part of the socialisation process of children, which should occur at school, at home and in any place where children live. There are very few studies on social interaction and collaboration roles with 3–4 year old. In this paper, we aim to understand collaboration in young children to help them develop their social skills and improve their overall development. To get this, we have designed an observational experiment to monitor and characterise group activity and roles, mediated by technology and using data mining techniques. First, we have designed a game as a free-play situation where the conditions require interplay of three children with toys and among interaction among peers. Children interacts with game through tangible toys. The environment collects accurate data on children’s actions automatically and non-intrusively. We also consider other data from direct observation by psychologists and educators. Then, we have organised a study for groups(triads) of 3 to 4-year-old children playing with this game. We analyse data from 81 children (51.9% boys and 48.1% girls) in groups of three randomly selected. The work proposes a set of actions in the game and from them a set of indicators, which are used as intermediate measures of observation to analyse the playing process. Social interaction is characterised in 5 levels: Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration, Troubled and Unproductive; and five roles: Saboteur, Missing, Explorer, Actor, Collaborator and Director. We found that children interact socially, engage in play, help each other and mostly reach the level of collaboration. There are minority cases of non-cooperation (Troubled or Unproductive), with conflict situations or trial and error solving processes, which cause the task to last a long time before it is finally finished. We have also found that children can adopt different roles in the group. Occasionally, there are cases of children who act as conductors, organising the work while others follow. This work provides a contribution for teachers and educators in the preschool classroom, relating to social interaction. It tells us that young children can play in randomly organised groups, collaborate and take roles, help their peers and learn to do so in classroom games. It shows a learning situation that can serve as an example of how to conduct technology-mediated activities in the classroom to promote social interaction among children in an effective, engaging and motivating way.

In this paper StarLoop, a Tangible Programing Language designed to support the learning of computer programing concepts for middle school children, is presented. StarLoop has been designed as a game to be played in an Interactive Space by up to four middle-school children. The StarLoop game uses the four tabletop devices as well as image projection on the Interactive Space walls. A first test with children has been carried out; it has been quite successful and no big usability problems encountered.

This paper presents "ToyVision": a software toolkit developed to facilitate the implementation of tangible games in visual-based tabletop devices. Compared to other toolkits for tabletops which offer very limited and tag-centered tangible possibilities, ToyVision provides designers with tools for modeling and implementing innovative tangible playing pieces with a high level of abstraction from the hardware. For this purpose, a new abstraction layer (the Widget layer) has been included in an already existing tabletop framework (ReacTIVision), providing the host application with high processed data about each playing piece involved in the game. To support the framework application, a Graphic Assistant tool enables the designer to visually model all the playing pieces into tangible tokens that can be tracked and controlled by the framework software. As a practical example, the complete process of prototyping a tangible game is described.

Studio participants will design and prototype tangible board-games for NIKVision: a tabletop computer for young children. The goal of this studio is to give designers and developers hands-on experience of developing a functional prototype of a tangible tabletop application without the intrinsic difficulties of managing electronic sensors, actuators and machine vision algorithms. During the studio attendees will complete a simple but conceptually complete tangible board-game prototype during the workshop day by abstracting the technologies and keeping focus firmly on the application behaviours and the interactions between users, objects and the system. This will be achieved through using the ToyVision toolkit, a set of software tools that lowers the threshold of prototyping both the "bits" and "atoms" of interactive tabletop games.

This paper presents a case study of the design lifecycle of games involving tangible interaction toys handled on an active surface tabletop. The games are oriented to 3--6 year old children, so special care has been taken in the methods used to involve them in a child-centered design lifecycle. The iterative nature of this design paradigm was supported by frequent test sessions where data relating to usability and fun was captured and analyzed in order to guide successive design iterations until a finished product was achieved. The aim is to guide designers intending to involve children in similar tabletop game creation projects. Details are given of how data collected from test sessions with children revealed usability problems and helped to create, evolve and improve the games.

We present a new set of toys and games especially designed to bring tabletop interaction closer to very young children. The use of these toys will be shown in an especially designed tabletop device adapted to children aged between 3 to 6 years old. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that these toys use a tangible interaction approach that can be easily adapted to any tabletop device based on visual recognition software. The final aim of this work is to combine physical group activities with educative computer games, in a unique interactive experience.

This paper describes a tabletop prototype that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer to manipulative learning. After analyzing children's cognitive and psychomotorial skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on observations of the children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment with the prototype.