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Exploring Children’s Engagement, Enjoyment and Collaboration on Tangible User Interfaces (Position Paper) Lesley Xie, Alissa Antle School of Interactive Arts and Technologies Simon Fraser University 13450 – 102nd Avenue, Surrey, BC. Canada V3T 0A3 {zxie, aantle}@sfu.ca
1. INTRODUCTION Face-to-face collaboration with classmates or friends is an important part of children’s daily lives, especially for school-aged children [16]. Traditional computer technology offers limited support for face-to-face, synchronous collaborations. In the past years, several research teams have explored alternative ways of interaction that facilitated computer-supported collaboration between children. Recent tangible user interface technology enabled the development of sharable interfaces offering support for concurrent, multi-user interactions around a shared tabletop display. These systems provide a unique collaboration environment in which users can share both the physical and the virtual workstations [16]. Part of my research study will investigate how tangible user interface based technology can impact children’s collaboration, and how this kind of collaboration can support children’s engagement and enjoyment of their working tasks.
2. BACKGROUND Children’s Collaboration Children communicate and learn through social interaction and through imitating one another. In doing so, they acquire new skills and learn to collaborate with others. Inkpen et al. [9] found that children exhibit a significantly higher level of engagement and activity when working alongside each other. Sluis et al. [18] suggested that a collaborative environment is more likely to elicit increased intrinsic motivation. Other studies have shown that working together in small groups increases children’s enjoyment, engagement and motivation (e.g., [8], [16]). Collaboration can increase children’s engagement and enjoyment on a specific playing task, and children will play or work together if possible. My Masters research study will investigate the relationship between interface type (graphical, physical and tangible) and children’s subjective ratings of enjoyment and behavior based indications of engagement while playing spatial games. One important aspect of tangible interfaces which is hypothesized to
impact engagement and enjoyment is the face to face nature of collaboration.
Tangible User Interfaces Tangibles are electronically augmented physical devices or tools. Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) and tangible interaction are terms increasingly gaining currency within the HCI research community. Building TUI systems specifically for children is a growing research area. Many people have explored how technology can enhance learning during child’s play, the role technology can and should play and how best to support children to develop cognitively through augmented play activities. But many of these studies focus on building the system rather proposing explanations for how and why tangibles might cause particular learning effects [2]. Noteworthy studies include: Africano et al. [1] proposed the development of a design of tangible interface as a learning tool for supporting school aged children to collaboratively learn on school tasks. Fails et al. [4] made a further step on exploring the difference between desktop and physical environments for children. They conducted a study on comparing the use of desktop and physical interactive environments by preschool-aged children. Price et al. [11] reported that interaction with tangibles encouraged engagement, excitement and collaboration. Projects utilizing augmented tabletop environments have demonstrated tabletops’ potential value over the past ten years. Many different research projects, including Ishii and Ulmer [10], FitzMaurice et al. [6], Rauterberg et al. [12], and Aliakseyeu et al. [3], have studied the required technology, the usability and several possible applications of tangible tabletop interfaces. The major advantages that have been identified are that tabletop environments can support collaboration. However, little is known about how and why such environments can be designed to support successful social interactions.
3. RESEARCH PROBLEMS Many people have explored how technology can be used to augment children’s play. Most recently, researchers started
working on developing different types of tangible interfaces for supporting children in play or pedagogical activities. However, most up-to-date research studies focused on developing new systems. Few of them have explicitly explored the advantages of building TUI based systems compared to building GUI based system for children and what factors can contribute to engagement and enjoyment in tangible games for school aged children. Understanding these issues is important because it will provide guidelines which should be considered in the design of the tangible games for children in the future. These issues form the foundation for my research. Another problem concerns methodological inquiry. Evaluating children’s engagement and enjoyment is prevalent in many user studies concerned with children and interactive technologies. However, issues of construct validity have been raised. Improved methods for evaluating these constructs with children still need to be discussed and developed. Engagement and enjoyment are two pivotal dependent variables that will be evaluated in my master research study. The conceptual definitions of engagement and enjoyment set the scope and meaning of the terms. Each is a complex construct derived from physical, social and cognitive theories. Davis [4] presented a causal theory of enjoyment. The basic premise is that an object of enjoyment causes the subject to experience pleasure by causing concurrent beliefs which satisfy desires concerning the experience itself. In other research studies, enjoyment was operationally defined as subjects’ (children’s) ratings of enjoyment on a vertical scale used in usability testing. Based on the work of Verhaegh et al. [19] evaluating tangible tabletops for children, I am exploring using four subscales of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) [14] in my study to evaluate enjoyment. These four subscales provide self reports of participants’ interest and enjoyment, perceived competence, pressure and tension, and effort with respect to their experiences playing a game in a research study. For most researchers, the term engagement entails some kind of mindfulness, cognitive effort and deep processing of new information [15]. On the other hand, some scholars equate engagement with time-on-task (i.e. actions and discourse not related to the task at hand) [17]. In my research study, engagement could be conceptually defined as the mobilization of cognitive, affective, and motivational strategies for specific tasks; it can operationally be defined as the amount of off-task behavior which is indicated by facial expression, body movement, gesture and verbal communication exhibited by the children. A more valid measure of engagement may need to be developed.
4. PURPOSE OF MY STUDY My research is about understanding what factors contribute to engagement and enjoyment in tangible spatial games for school age children. My approach is a comparative study which explores how interface or interaction factors impact engagement and enjoyment in tangible spatial games under a collaborative condition for school aged children. My study will contribute to the knowledge base by exploring the influence of tangible interface and interaction features for spatial game on engagement and enjoyment of school age children. By comparing the GUI and TUI system on the same game content, I can investigate what interface elements or aspects of interaction (vs. content or game structure) might be important, and what factors can contribute to engagement and enjoyment in tangible spatial games so that these aspects can be considered in the design of such games in the future.
5. CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORKSHOP My research study will involve the development of a tabletop tangible interface which can support the collaborative work of multi-users. The shareable interface workshop at Open University will provide me with a good opportunity to explore advanced collaborative co-located technologies. The future direction of my research study will be sharable interface related. Lessons learned during this workshop may help be better understand the relationship between collaboration and children’s engagement and enjoyment and can consolidate my knowledge on the collaborative technologies, which will be used for further investigation on my thesis work.
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