Research shows that dialogic reading (adults and children engaging in conversation about the book they are reading) facilitates young children's language and vocabulary development and success in learning to read. A growing body of research suggests that parent-child dyads engage in less dialogic reading with e-books than with traditional paper books. Previous researchers have suggested this effect may be due to interactive features such as animations and games distracting children from the storyline, or that voice-over narration may compete with parent verbalization. The current study is the first to test this explanation directly, by comparing parent-child reading of a "feature-free" e-book with reading a paper book. Results showed that even "plain" e-books with severely limited interactive features led to less parent-child conversation about book content than reading with paper books. It is critical that these results inform parents, educators, developers, and the research community with regard to policy and practice for young children's media use.

Electric Agents is a multi-player game that uses augmented reality on mobile phones to facilitate in-room collaboration and promote joint media engagement around interactive educational television content in the home. Joint media engagement describes 'collaborative' consumption of media and has potential learning benefits. Our research examines whether technology can support joint media engagement, through the use of a series of prototypes that combine handheld augmented reality with web-based video. In pilot testing, sibling play patterns showed evidence of the kind of in-room collaboration and joint media engagement that previous research has shown to facilitate children in making sense of media content.

Electric Agents is a cross-media game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. In the game Manny, a member of the Pranksters, steals words out of the mouth of Hector, a member of The Electric Company team, and hides them to prevent the story from progressing. Children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect the missing vocabulary words relevant to the show narrative. The players return the stolen words back to the show by "throwing" the words towards the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a narrative and a game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play and use of specific vocabulary words.

This paper outlines a series of experiments to develop asynchronous messaging systems for preschool aged children. Three unique systems build on a foundational design called Toaster, a jack-in-the box toy with embedded mobile phone that allows children to playfully take and share electronic media. Orange Toaster allows children to create and share self-portraits; Family Toast allows children to browse family photos with physical tokens, and shares their self-portrait reactions with remote family members; Play with Elmo allows children and distant adults to asynchronously share playful video messages. Observations with over 30 children suggest that asynchronous photographic or video messaging with very young children is possible. The results of these studies indicate specific guidelines including (1) children's UI's need to be playful and immediate (2) UI designs for children should create the "here and now" feel of real-time interaction, and (3) adults' UI's must provide emotionally meaningful feedback from children to engage adult users.

StoryVisit allows children and long-distance adults to experience a sense of togetherness by reading children's story books together over a distance. StoryVisit combines video conferencing and connected books: remote grown-up and child readers can see and hear each other, and can also see and control the same e-book. We report on research with 61 families - over 200 users including parents, children and long-distance readers - who used StoryVisit in their homes with a long-distance reader for at least one reading session. In addition, we report qualitative findings regarding nineteen of the families who participated in telephone interviews and four families who were monitored and interviewed by researchers at home. Results show that connected e-book video chat sessions last about five times as long as the typical video chats reported in previous research on families with young children. Moreover, the addition of an animated character increased session lengths by another 50%. StoryVisit usage peaked for families with three year olds, showing that sustained distance interactions with very young children are possible if communication technologies incorporate joint activities that engage children and adults.

In this work, we introduce Interactive Rich Reading, a new enhanced book experience designed to run on smartphones and a tablet device. Interactive Rich Reading is characterized by a video-based conversational agent that asks questions or makes comments about the current page and is specifically designed to promote engagement with the contents of children's books. We use video compositing techniques to overlay the conversational agent directly over the book contents, creating a magical experience for children by bringing the book to life. We describe technical issues related to enabling this experience on mobile platforms for easier adoption of this technique by other researchers and practitioners.

We introduce Family Story Play, a system that supports grandparents to read books together with their grandchildren over the Internet. Family Story Play is designed to improve communication across generations and over a distance, and to support parents and grandparents in fostering the literacy development of young children. The interface encourages active child participation in the book reading experience by combining a paper book, a sensor-enhanced frame, video conferencing technology, and video content of a Sesame Street Muppet (Elmo). Results with users indicate that Family Story Play improves child engagement in long-distance communication and increases the quality of interaction between young children and distant grandparents. Additionally, Family Story Play encourages dialogic reading styles that are linked with literacy development. Ultimately, reading with Family Story Play becomes a creative shared activity that suggests a new kind of collaborative story telling.

There is a growing body of research on usability and interaction design with and for children using computers [1, 2, 3]. Less is known about interaction design and usability as applied to children's use of mobile devices. Sesame Workshop has redesigned a web-based literacy intervention for young readers to run on the Apple iPod Touch. We report on design challenges in moving from large screens and mouse-based interactions to small screens and touch-based interactions, and make interface and interaction design recommendations based on the results of our prototyping and research with children.

While adult performance with different pointing devices has received extensive study in the human-computer interaction literature, there is little data on the performance of young children using any input devices at all. In the present study, 64 three-year-old children used a joystick, mouse, or trackball to perform a simple cursor placement task. Two substantive results were obtained. First, trackball users were the slowest, but also the most accurate in their cursor control. Second, characteristics of the children's performance suggest that adult standards for an optimal interface, which stress speed and efficiency, may not be appropriate when children are the intended users.