Child Computer Interaction Research Articles

Child-Computer Interaction With Mobile Devices: Recent Works, New Dataset, and Age Detection

This article provides an overview of recent research in Child-Computer Interaction with mobile devices and describe our framework ChildCI intended for: i) overcoming the lack of large-scale publicly available databases in the area, ii) generating a better understanding of the cognitive and neuromotor development of children along time, contrary to most previous studies in the literature focused on a single-session acquisition, and iii) enabling new applications in e-Learning and e-Health through the acquisition of additional information such as the school grades and children's disorders, among others. Our framework includes a new mobile application, specific data acquisition protocols, and a first release of the ChildCI dataset (ChildCIdb v1), which is planned to be extended yearly to enable longitudinal studies. In our framework children interact with a tablet device, using both a pen stylus and the finger, performing different tasks that require different levels of neuromotor and cognitive skills. ChildCIdb is the first database in the literature that comprises more than 400 children from 18 months to 8 years old, considering therefore the first three development stages of the Piaget's theory. In addition, and as a demonstration of the potential of the ChildCI framework, we include experimental results for one of the many applications enabled by ChildCIdb: children age detection based on device interaction.

Computational empowerment in practice: Scaffolding teenagers’ learning about emerging technologies and their ethical and societal impact

Whereas computational empowerment is well established in child–computer interaction research, less effort has been made to integrate this approach in practice. Building on four existing principles in child–computer interaction, namely Closeness, Embodied Learning, Design Process and Decoding, we explore how computational empowerment can be scaffolded in practice. This study was part of an interdisciplinary research project exploring emerging technologies in education (CEED). We involved 9 teachers and 26 students (14–15 y) in Denmark in teaching about machine learning and augmented reality. In the article we develop a framework for applying computational empowerment in formal educational contexts. Based on the study, we found that computational empowerment builds on distinct layers which are these four principles. Specifically, merging the principles Closeness and Embodied Learning can increase student engagement and motivation in the activities; in addition, Decoding and Design Process are key principles for promoting student awareness of the societal impacts of emerging technologies. Based on qualitative data from this intervention, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for child–computer interaction in moving toward computational empowerment in practice.

Automatic Speech Emotion Recognition of Younger School Age Children

This paper introduces the extended description of a database that contains emotional speech in the Russian language of younger school age (8–12-year-old) children and describes the results of validation of the database based on classical machine learning algorithms, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The validation is performed using standard procedures and scenarios of the validation similar to other well-known databases of children’s emotional acting speech. Performance evaluation of automatic multiclass recognition on four emotion classes “Neutral (Calm)—Joy—Sadness—Anger” shows the superiority of SVM performance and also MLP performance over the results of perceptual tests. Moreover, the results of automatic recognition on the test dataset which was used in the perceptual test are even better. These results prove that emotions in the database can be reliably recognized both by experts and automatically using classical machine learning algorithms such as SVM and MLP, which can be used as baselines for comparing emotion recognition systems based on more sophisticated modern machine learning methods and deep neural networks. The results also confirm that this database can be a valuable resource for researchers studying affective reactions in speech communication during child-computer interactions in the Russian language and can be used to develop various edutainment, health care, etc. applications.

Critical agenda driving child–computer interaction research—Taking a stock of the past and envisioning the future

There is a revitalized interest in power and politics around design and technology in the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) field. Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research community has also shown arousing interest towards the topic. However, despite this emerging interest, the CCI research community has remained quite silent about the potential of a critical agenda for CCI. Few studies have explicitly addressed critical research or critical design. This study introduces the notion of a critical agenda for CCI research and identifies CCI studies that are linked with the critical agenda, revealing that there are CCI studies showing emerging interests and seeds for addressing the critical agenda. Overall, this study explores the state-of-the-art critical research tradition in CCI and explicates the potential of this tradition for making the world a better place through design and technology in collaboration with children.

Research in Child–Computer Interaction: Provocations and envisioning future directions

In the 21st century the academic field of Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) arose alongside burgeoning interactive technology and digital media industries that targeted children. We believe that the field of CCIU is at an important point in its development, analogous to when a child becomes a teen. Over the last few years we have each had many informal conversations with other CCI researchers in which we discuss issues such as, what is our responsibility as researchers beyond academe? What values underlie our conceptions of a ”good” childhood and the role of interactive technology in it? And, how do we ensure that our field continues to grow and evolve in ways that are consistent with our responsibilities and values? To address these and other complex questions that have been drawing our attention we came together to reflect, discuss and create a position paper for our community, in which we outline some of the issues we see facing our community at this time. To inform our deliberations with opinions beyond our own we conducted an informal consultation with 25 members of the CCI community. Our responders spanned junior to senior researchers, represented diverse geographies and included industry practitioners. These diverse responses provided further content for our reflections, and helped us see perspectives beyond our own. The result of this informal process is this speculative paper in which we propose a series of seven provocations that aim to disrupt some of the normative assumptions held in our field. Our goal in doing this is to open up dialogue in our community about these issues and promote consideration of the alternative visions we present for where we might focus our attention and efforts. We see our contribution not as truth or a definitive statement of a vision for the field, but rather as our opinion about some of the complex issues we face and that we think should be considered through dialogue as we move into the next phase of our development as an academic and scholarly community. We believe that it is urgent and critical for our field that we take up these questions, explore diverse perspectives, and critically work towards decisions and actions that will define our identity and the value of our contributions as we move forward into the next 20 years of research in CCI.

Child–Computer Interaction: From a systematic review towards an integrated understanding of interaction design methods for children

Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) is a steadily growing field that focuses on children as a prominent and emergent user group. For more than twenty years, the Interaction Design for Children (IDC) community has developed, extended, and advanced research and design methods for children’s involvement in designing and evaluating interactive technologies. However, as the CCI field evolves, the need arises for an integrated understanding of interaction design methods currently applied. To that end, we analyzed 272 full papers across a selection of journals and conference venues from 2005 to 2020. Our review contributes to the literature on this topic by (1) examining a holistic child population, including developmentally diverse children and children from 0 to 18 years old, (2) illustrating the interplay of children’s and adults’ roles across different methods, and (3) identifying patterns of triangulation in the methods applied while taking recent ethical debates about children’s involvement in design into account. While we found that most studies were conducted in natural settings, we observed a preference for evaluating interactive artifacts at a single point in time. Method triangulation was applied in two-thirds of the papers, with a preference for qualitative methods. Researchers used triangulation predominantly with respect to mainstream methods that were not specifically developed for child participants, such as user observation combined with semi-structured interviews or activity logging. However, the CCI field employs a wide variety of creative design methods which engage children more actively in the design process by having them take on roles such as informant and design partner. In turn, we see that more passive children’s roles, e.g., user or tester, are more often linked to an expert mindset by the adult. Adults take on a wider spectrum of roles in the design process when addressing specific developmental groups, such as children with autism spectrum disorder. We conclude with a critical discussion about the constraints involved in conducting CCI research and discuss implications that can inform future methodological advances in the field and underlying challenges.

Examining theory use in design research on fantasy play

Play is an essential activity in children’s lives. In the Child Computer Interaction (CCI) field, many authors refer to play and play theories when they describe their work. Play theories can come from many different disciplines, such as psychology, sociology and learning sciences. Theories from different disciplines can provide interpretations and inspiration sources when designing for play. In this study, we explore what theory clusters authors use and how they are used when design researchers report on design work for fantasy play. Based on 19 artefact-centred papers from the ACM digital library from the period 1999–2018, we analyse four components of reported theory use: design intention, design argumentation, design decisions and design evaluation. This paper provides a list of theory clusters that designers report on, showing that different clusters also indicate different conceptualisations of play. Furthermore, it describes three common strategies of theory cluster use: for contextualising the value of play, for highlighting the outcome of play and using design cases as ‘theory’ for supporting making design decisions. The paper concludes by providing reflective questions about how to report on the use of theory in designing for fantasy play. The questions can be used in order for future work in the Child Computer Interaction community to be precise and transparent about theory use in order to make it easier to build upon each other’s work.

Action-based embodied design for mathematics learning: A decade of variations on a theme

Embodied cognition theory emphasizes that bodily interaction with the environment is important for all forms of learning, including mathematics. This theoretical trend coincides well with developments in motion responsive technology, and has resulted in numerous embodied technologies for mathematics learning. This review aims to contribute to clarifying theoretically and empirically grounded design principles of action-based embodied designs for mathematics learning. We analyzed 79 publications between 2010 and 2019, containing 15 studies assessing 15 sensorimotor problems for five mathematical domains (proportion, angle, area, parabola, and sine function), and explicated the characteristics of the technologies, their learning sequences and elicited learning processes, and the influence of within-topic ask variations on students’ learning. We found that action-based designs pose motor control problems using continuous motion feedback to facilitate learners to discover and practice a challenging new ways of moving their hand(s) in which to ground mathematical cognition. The state of discovery of the sensorimotor solution is important, and passive and readymade designs are cautioned. The learning sequence in which these technologies are embedded, elicit mathematical knowing through necessary and sequential phases in which personal idiosyncratic experiences increasingly converge into a culturally shared mathematical discourse. In the qualitative stage, an acting step elicits students to actively establish new motor coordination-patterns through the emergence of new perceptual structures known as attentional anchors. In the subsequent reflecting step, students’ personal sensorimotor experiences and attentional anchors become the ground for referencing in (a shared) mathematical discourse through multimodal (words, gestures) collaboration with a tutor. In the quantitative stage, measuring artifacts (grids, protractors, numbers, variables) are included in students’ field of promoted action, which discretize and formalize students’ actions and subsequent reflections into culturally recognizable quantitative forms. Critically, task factors such as the type of objects students manipulate (cursors icons, bars, rectangle), and the direction these objects are moved (parallel, orthogonal), affect students’ attentional anchors and subsequent reflections in the qualitative stage, but converge to similar mathematical insights in the quantitative stage. These insights help to better use (new) motion responsive technology in eliciting child–computer interaction that can lead to mathematical cognition and beyond.

Children caring for robots: Expanding computational thinking frameworks to include a technological ethic of care

Computational thinking (CT) is receiving growing attention in educational contexts, where robot coding toys are becoming a widely available means of teaching and learning early computing. As the field of child–computer interaction continues to define what it means for young children to think computationally, much is unknown about the affective dimensions of children’s interactions with computers, for example how children care for materials like coding robots and how they establish social responsibility in computational environments. This paper examines these questions in the context of an early childhood coding curriculum designed to support CT in Kindergarten. Children’s talk and interactions with robots provide insight into how they were learning to care for and maintain robots when they malfunctioned. Drawing together feminist perspectives on computing, constructionism, and care, we develop a notion of a technological ethic of care and locate this in children’s early coding experiences. Through critical discourse analysis, we present two cases where groups of children interacted with each other, their teachers, and a robot called Cubetto, establishing forms of responsibility for technology. We argue that an ethic of care must be part of computational discourses in an era of climate change, where caring for technologies and keeping them in working order is key to sustainable socio-ecological relations.

Smart-thing design by children at a distance: How to engage them and make them learn

In recent years, research in Child–ComputerInteraction has shifted the focus from design with children, giving them a voice in the design process, to design by children to bring child participants different benefits, such as engagement and learning. However, design workshops, encompassing different stages, are challenging in terms of engagement and learning, e.g., they require prolonged commitment and concentration. They are potentially more challenging when held at a distance, as in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper explores at-a-distance smart-thing design by children, how it can engage different children and support their learning in programming.The paper reports a series of design workshops with 20 children, aged from 8 to 16 years old, all held at a distance. They were all organised with the DigiSNaP design framework and toolkit. The first workshop enabled children to explore what smart things are, to start ideating their own smart things and to scaffold their programming. The other workshops enabled children to evolve their own smart-thing ideas and programs. Data were gathered in relation to children’s engagement and learning from different sources. Results are promising for future editions of smart-thing design at a distance or in a hybrid modality. They are discussed along with guidelines for smart-thing design by children at a distance.

Going beyond short-term, ‘reduced’ PD: Towards an encompassing typology for children’s participation in infrastructuring processes

Although child participation has been on the Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research agenda for many years, there is a lacuna in research on the roles children can play in long-term, sustained Participatory Design (PD) processes. This article explores the characteristics of an infrastructuring approach to PD that revolves around long-term and on-going socio-technical processes as opposed to the more typical short-term PD projects concerned with delivering a finished design product. Based on empirical data collected in three case studies involving both short-and long-term PD processes with children between 6 and 16 years old, we investigated different roles children can play in long-term, sustained PD. The contribution of this study is a comprehensive typology of children’s roles that goes beyond children’s participation in traditional, ‘staged’ PD. This typology offers the necessary vocabulary and analytical toolbox to account for key notions of infrastructuring, including ‘match-making’, ‘publics’, ‘agonism’, ‘attachments’, ‘shared issues’ and ‘capacity-building’.

In Pursuit of Inclusive and Diverse Digital Futures: Exploring the Potential of Design Fiction in Education of Children

2020 marks the beginning of a new era as the pandemic catapulted us into new digital and virtual ways of everyday life. As the world changes, we reimagine empowering, equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive digital futures, through a series of projects and workshops with a diverse set of participants - children in schools and Child Computer Interaction researchers. We conducted one long-term project with two schools in Finland and two one-day workshops with an international set of participants. Through an analysis of participants’ experiences and outcomes in the project and workshops, we build a case for diversity and inclusionthrough design fiction in the context of children’s education. In addition, through an analysis of the process we as researchers took for developing the project and workshops, we showcase the support of diversity and inclusion in design fiction.

Ethical dilemmas experienced by students in Child–Computer Interaction—A case study

Although there is an increased focus on the ethical responsibilities of designers when designing children’s technologies, there are few academic examples of what it entails to teach this to design students. We have therefore set out to explore the most common ethical dilemmas experienced by design students in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) when interacting with children in the field. This case study article reports on an analysis of the situated ethical experiences from 45 international master students in interaction design during their projects to design children’s technologies. The main research question for this paper is what common ethical dilemmas students in CCI experience when involving children in their design process. The dilemmas we present stem from the written home exams of the students in our course and have been clustered under three temporally relevant themes: Selection of participants, Informed Consent, and Working with children. These situational ethical dilemmas can be used by teachers in the field to complement the formal ethical guidelines provided to students and have a discussion on how to deal with them in their own practice.

Eye tracking in Child Computer Interaction: Challenges and opportunities

Eye trackers allow for the collection of eye gaze data. These data can include eye gaze points which are two dimensional Cartesian coordinates (x,y) that represent a point on a screen (for screen-based eye trackers) or points in a natural real-world environment (e.g., at home, school or a supermarket). Advances in eye tracking technology have resulted in less intrusive devices being developed that open up opportunities for the Child Computer Interaction community (CCI) to understand how children interact with digital technologies and offer new insights into their cognitive processing. This paper reports the results of a literature review of three digital libraries using the Quorom technique, to identify research on eye tracking that aligns with the core themes of CCI researchers. In total 66 papers were identified that related to the themes of design, education, programming and interaction design. The results highlighted that eye tracking studies with children have relatively small sample sizes (median n=11) and that the median age of the children participating in the studies is 10.3 (inter-quartile range = 3.96). The metrics used within the research studies are predominately fixation duration and fixations within areas of interest. The paper contributes to a critique of existing methodological challenges to ensure quality data is obtained from studies involving children. In addition, the review identified that there are clear opportunities to further understand children’s interaction with digital technology using other metrics such as pupillometry and blinks; these can assist to understand phenomenon including cognitive load and arousal which may be useful for user experience research.

Sensing technologies and child–computer interaction: Opportunities, challenges and ethical considerations

This study presents the outcomes of a systematic literature review of empirical evidence on the capabilities of sensing technologies for child–computer interaction (CCI). This paper provides an overview of what and how sensing technologies have been used to explain, understand, and predict children’s experiences with interactive devices and technologies and in what contexts. A search resulted in 44 papers that were included in the analysis. The results of the review depict the capabilities of sensing technologies for gauging children’s performance, engagement, and experiences (while interacting with technology) and the ongoing advances and implications that emerge from the employment of sensors to capture and improve child behavior. In particular, we identified the four main objectives (i.e., engagement of children, recognition/prediction of special needs/behavior, explaining/understanding the behavior/attitude, and learning performance/experiences) that the CCI research has been focusing on with sensor data. We also summarize the implications derived from the reviewed articles and frame them within four thematic areas. Finally, this review stresses that future research should consider developing a framework that would enable sensor data capacities to be aligned with the ethical, social, and generalizability guidelines. These sensor capacities could also be utilized to advance theory and practice. Our findings set a baseline for supporting the adoption and democratization of sensor data within future interactive technology research and development for children.

Designing for Children’s Reflections in Collaborative Interaction Mediated by Technology: A Systematic Literature Review

Reflection is an integral part of collaborative interaction. However, we know little about how to design for reflection in collaborative activities mediated by technologies. This systematic literature review focuses on children’s reflections within the collaborative practices in child-computer interaction research and investigates (1) the link between reflection and collaborative activities, (2) the types of collaborative technologies to scaffold reflection, and (3) the methodological approaches to analyze reflection. We searched the ACM Digital Library, Scopus and ProQuest which resulted in 141 papers that make the link between terms ‘reflection’ and ‘collaboration’ explicit, where only 13 of these involve children as the primary actors of reflection. The results show that this topic is increasingly gaining attention, however, the link between reflection and collaborative interaction remains underdeveloped. The contribution of this study is to provide a theoretical and methodological basis to understand, analyze and support children’s reflections within a collaborative activity through technology.

Serious Game Design to Support Children Struggling with School Refusal

A significant number of children worldwide struggle with school refusal. Games and digital tools represent a novel take on how to address this phenomenon. Our research aims to support children who are at risk or in an early phase of developing school refusal through serious games. In this paper we present current work, grounded in human-centered design, involving the application of a game design framework to elaborate on design elements and empirical evaluations of a serious game called Gnist (English: Spark). Based on this we discuss some implications for game design and key takeaways for researchers and practitioners working to design technologies for supporting children's well-being in attending school. We contribute to position serious games in a new context and anticipate our findings to be valuable to the Human-Computer Interaction community in general and specifically to the Child-Computer Interaction community.

Evaluation of Child-Computer Interaction Using Fitts' Law: A Comparison between a Standard Computer Mouse and a Head Mouse.

This study evaluates and compares the suitability for child–computer interaction (CCI, the branch within human–computer interaction focused on interactive computer systems for children) of two devices: a standard computer mouse and the ENLAZA interface, a head mouse that measures the user’s head posture using an inertial sensor. A multidirectional pointing task was used to assess the motor performance and the users’ ability to learn such a task. The evaluation was based on the interpretation of the metrics derived from Fitts’ law. Ten children aged between 6 and 8 participated in this study. Participants performed a series of pre- and post-training tests for both input devices. After the experiments, data were analyzed and statistically compared. The results show that Fitts’ law can be used to detect changes in the learning process and assess the level of psychomotor development (by comparing the performance of adults and children). In addition, meaningful differences between the fine motor control (hand) and the gross motor control (head) were found by comparing the results of the interaction using the two devices. These findings suggest that Fitts’ law metrics offer a reliable and objective way of measuring the progress of physical training or therapy.

A narrative review of methods used to examine digital gaming impacts on learning and cognition during middle childhood

Middle childhood remains a privileged albeit understudied developmental period in studies examining child–computer interactions, particularly as it pertains to digital game play. Middle childhood also is marked by increasing digital game play, arguably the most common form of child–computer interactions during this developmental period. For example, children between the ages of 6 and 8 play digital games 60–90 min per day and 47% of 3rd to 8th grade teachers reported using digital games in their classrooms several times a week (Vega & Robb, 2019). Surprisingly, how content learning and cognition may be facilitated through digital gaming remains sparsely investigated among children during this period. In the studies that do examine the linkages between game play and content learning or cognition, research methodologies vary markedly. The goal of this narrative review is to help bring greater cohesion to the research literature, which often spans many disciplines. This review emphasizes the games, measurement of outcomes, and research designs that have been used to examine content learning and cognitive skills among children ages 6 to 12 in the context of digital games.

Toy user interface design—Tools for Child–Computer Interaction

A Toy User Interface (ToyUI) is a setup combination of one or more toy components with other hardware or software components. As part of new technologies that permeate the Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) domain, a ToyUI can combine physical toy components with social robots, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, among other computing artifacts. This paper compiles a collection of design tools that we develop to support interdisciplinary creators in prototyping innovative ToyUI setups. The design tools aim to help the CCI community understand the benefits of hardware and software integration while delivering solutions that can meet privacy by design principles. We apply the Design Science framework to assess the problem context and propose and evaluate the design tools following a Human-Centered Design (HCD) perspective. The tools cover steps from inspiration to ideation and implementation, including user research, brainstorming, data collection planning, and low to high-fidelity prototyping tools. We detail the current version of the design tools and six years of results through qualitative evaluation in an educational setting (with 255 creators in seven different institutions). We also propose novel versions of the tools to support remote teamwork and education, and we highlight training challenges during the social distancing context.