Editorial: the evolving field of tangible interaction for children: the challenge of empirical validation

Pers Ubiquit Comput Editorial: the evolving field of tangible interaction for children: the challenge of empirical validation Bieke Zaman 0 1 2 3 4 Vero Vanden Abeele 0 1 2 3 4 Panos Markopoulos 0 1 2 3 4 Paul Marshall 0 1 2 3 4 0 V. Vanden Abeele e-Media Lab, GROUP T, Leuven Engineering College/CUO (Association KULeuven) , Vesaliusstraat 13, 3000 Leuven , Belgium 1 B. Zaman Future Health Department, IBBT-K.U.Leuven , Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2446, 3001 Leuven , Belgium 2 B. Zaman (&) Centre for User Experience Research (CUO), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven , Parkstraat 45 Bus 3605, 3000 Leuven , Belgium 3 P. Marshall WMG, University of Warwick , CV4 7AL Coventry , UK 4 P. Markopoulos User Centred Engineering Group, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology , Den Dolech 2, 5612 AZ Eindhoven , the Netherlands This special issue is devoted to the topic of tangible user interfaces and children. It emphasizes research on tangibility that transcends system descriptions, focusing on the empirical support of theories and design guidance. The papers result from the organization of a workshop at the CHI 2009 ACM conference in Boston, USA. As an introduction to this issue, empirical evidence is discussed for the potential benefits that using TUIs may have for children. Next, we focus on the impact of tangibility in terms of usability, learning, collaboration, and fun. Finally, we suggest directions for future work and outline the papers that are included in this special issue. TUI; Children; Collaboration; Fun 1 Introduction In the history of this young research field on tangible user interfaces and children, the concepts of tangible user interfaces and tangibility have fluidly evolved as a result of developments in technology and design. A host of related and overlapping terms and definitions for tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have become popular, such as graspable user interfaces [1], tangible bits [2], or tangible and embodied interaction [3]. Important as they may be, in this special issue, we shall not focus on the fine nuances and differences between such concepts. Instead, we adopt a broad perspective on tangibility that mirrors the continued emphasis of related design and research work on the physicality of interaction and the closeness of mapping between physical manipulations of the tangibles and the input/output semantics. The term tangible user interfaces is used here in accordance with Shaer and Horneckers [4] definition: Interfaces that are concerned with providing tangible representations to digital information and controls, allowing users to quite literally grasp data with their hand and effect functionality by physical manipulations of these representations. The majority of research on tangibles has been innovation oriented. Researchers often explore the design space enabled by embedding computation in physical objects. A relatively large proportion of this type of research has concerned applications for children. The relevance of TUIs for childrens education was pointed out even before the emergence of the term TUI, with the pioneering work on Mindstorms by Papert [5] where programming was associated with physical objects. This work has continued through several investigations, e.g., examining the design of robots [6] and educational toys for children, up to the more recent work on digital manipulatives from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT (e.g., [7, 8]). In addition to the educational relevance of tangibility for children, researchers have focused on its entertainment and usability potential as well. For instance, the I/O brush was introduced by Ryokai [9] as a novel and intuitive interface for coloring in digital painting applications. The interest of researchers in the role of physical interaction for childrens entertainment goes back at least to the mid1990s. An early example is the Rosebud [10], where a stuffed animal was used by children to store and retrieve stories. In the discussion of the entertainment value of tangible interfaces, one should note that the boundary is quite blurred between a childs toy featuring some electronics and interactivity and what the research community might recognize as a TUI designed to support childrens play. Finally, a host of games for children featuring tangibility have also been introduced to encourage educational outcomes through collaboration (see for instance [11, 12]). Other benefits aimed for have been of a more social nature. For example, the pOwerball [13] was an augmented reality tabletop pinball game designed to encourage children with mixed abilities to have fun together and interact socially during the game. While enthusiasm for TUIs and the widespread conviction that tangibility brings about additional value to users is anything but wavering, some researchers have started to comment on the lack of empirical evidence to support these assumed benefits [1416]. These pressing issues motivated the organization of a workshop at the CHI 2009 ACM conference in Boston, USA. It led to the production of this special issue, which aimed to provide a more balanced view on the benefits of tangibility for children. In particular, this editorial begins by summarizing the currently available empirical evidence regarding the potential benefits that using TUIs may have for children. We first focus on the empirical evidence for the usability benefits of tangible user interfaces with children, followed by a focus on the learning benefits and then the benefits for fun. While these are treated separately for reasons of clarity, there are potentially strong relationships between these three perspectives and issues relating to collaboration. Next, the empirical models of research that have been used to generate the claims about tangibility are discussed. Finally, we suggest directions for future work and outline the papers that are included in this special issue. 2 Expectations from tangible interaction From the very early and pioneering work on tangibility, expectations have clustered around four areas. Firstly that tangibility has been associated with improved usability, generally linked to the naturalness of manipulating physical objects and capitalizing on users innate skills. Secondly, it has been suggested that tangible user interfaces can bring about potential learning benefits to children, which may arise through links between concrete manipulations and cognition. Thirdly, tangible user interfaces are often considered to be more fun to use than more traditional kinds of interfaces, due to the physicality of the interaction and perhaps the increased visibility. Finally, it has been claimed that TUIs may offer benefits in terms of collaboration, a benefit that often serves as a catalyst for the expectations mentioned above. The facilitation of collaboration through tangible interaction can arise from having shared and equal access to interacting with a system. In the secti (...truncated)