Kids Computer Interaction with a Focus on Story Telling and Educational RoboticsCristina Gena Computer Science Department, University of Turin corso Svizzera 185
,
10149, Turin
In the invited talk at KDAH 2018 workshop (CIKM 2018 conference) I have presented two projects carried out in our HCI lab and target to child: the rst one is related to the evaluation in the wild of of a storytelling app for kids based on the swipe story approach, the second one is related to Wolly, an educational robot co-designed with children.
-
Child-computer interaction concerns the study of the
design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive
computer systems for children, and the wider impact
of technology on children and society. According to
Hourcade [
4
], this de nition, paraphrasing the
Association for Computing Machinerys (ACM) de nition
of human-computer interaction, lists design,
evaluation and implementation in an order in which they
normally do not occur. This is intentional, as most
human child-computer interaction research is about
design, followed by evaluation, followed by
implementation.
In the invited talk I have presented two projects
carried out in our HCI lab, which will be described in the
following.
1I Leoni del Tempo - Archeostorie del Friuli Venezia Giulia
- The Lions of Time - Archeo-stories of Friuli Venezia Giulia is
an archeological story, based on the swipe story
approach2. A swipe story is a digital story that, with a
simple and immediate gesture (namely the swipe) and
a language based on drawings, images, words, games,
sounds, movies and emotions, is able to start the young
user to a new path of knowledge. The swipe story was
launched at the 2017 Turin International Book Fair3.
The swipe story is realized throughout a tablet and
smartphone app, freely available in Google Play and
App store markets4. This swipe story supports an
illustrated novel [
1
], and digital storytelling has been
applied with the aim to bring the young audiences
closer to the knowledge of the cultural heritage of Friuli
Venezia Giulia, the Italian region situated further to
the North East.
The story takes the user to discover the
archaeological sites of Friuli Venezia Giulia, where the present
is intertwined with the past, reality with
imagination. Swipe after swipe, the user is walking in
spacetime in the company of the three characters (Eleonora,
Leonardo, and Ruggero) between reconstructions of
places, cities (Pradis and Aquileia) and ancient
monuments, on the light wings of fantasy.
During the 2017 Turin International Book Fair, Le
Muse Archaeological Association5 organized a public
event at the Fruili Venezia Giulia stand, for
presenting to the public the swipe story The Lions of Time.
For collecting an initial and spontaneous feedback from
real users, we invited to the event a group of families
having children in the 7-9 age range. The children
who participated at the event were 12, 5 females and
7 males. 9 of them have extensively played the swipe
story, and we have based our main observations on
their interactions. For the trial, we had 7
Androidbased tablets and 2 Android-based smartphones. We
left the children free to interact with the swipe-story,
giving as little instructions as possible, telling them
only that they were there for the launch of a new app
for children, and they would be the rst to try it. In
fact we were there in 4 observing them, and one of us
video-recorded the children and their interactions for
further post hoc analysis.
This limited and initial evaluation in the wild (inspired
by the methodology described in [
5
]) showed how the
mobile app has been specially developed in order to
win the attention of the little ones. The children,
despite being very young, have not had any problem in
the immediate use of the story, a sign that the digital
natives are used to using new technologies not only to
play, but also to communicate and above all to learn.
In the short period of use they managed to quickly
learn what the app showed, even if with important and
culturally advanced contents, without getting bored or
learning di culties. As future improvement, we should
think of a series of images with comics and/or
narrating voice also for the in-depth analysis provided when
clicking on question marks, in order to improve the
level of the engagement proposed by the app. Another
improvement could be that of expanding the
quantity of games proposed at the end, also linking them
to moments of didactical learning and deepening, and
introducing gami cation mechanisms to increase the
children involvement.
3
Educational Robotics
In our HCI lab, we carried out a co-design activity
with children aimed at devising an educational robot
called Wolly (for more details see [
2
]). The main goal
of the robot is acting as an a ective peer for children:
hence, it has to be able to execute a standard set of
commands, compatible with those used in coding,
but also to interact both verbally and a ectively with
students. We are now working on controlling Wolly
by means of a standard visual block environment,
Blockly6, which is well know to many children with
some experience in coding. However, we would also
like to have a simpler set of instructions, speci cally
designed for Wolly, so that children can use basic
commands to control its behavior.
As far as the co-design is concerned, in November
2017, we carried out a co-design session with 25
children, described in detail in [
2
]. All children
were in the third grade, 8 to 9 years old, and with
no experience in educational robotics. Following a
co-design methodology, they were asked to provide
suggestions for some features of the robot: its name,
physical appearance, facial expressions, personality
and character. Based on the insights drawn from the
co-design process, we designed the robot appearance
and structure. In particular, the robot - built using a
common hobby robotic kit - is able to move through
its four independent motorized wheels and can be
controlled through either a web application or a set of
Android apps that contact its REST APIs. Its body
has been almost completely 3D printed, while its head
consists in an Android-based smartphone able to show
and perceive emotions, to produce verbal expressions
and to understand voice commands.
As far as interactive features are concerned, Wolly
plays the role of an educational robot that helps
kids in coding exercises, giving them suggestions on
how to reach their goals and write their code, at the
same time being able to execute instructions such as
moving on a chessboard, as other educational robots
can do. However, since Wolly is also able to interact
with kids in a verbal and a ective way, we would like
to enable children to program its basic behaviors and
social interactions, in order to teach them the basis of
social robot programming.
[1]
F.Barelli
.
I leoni del tempo
.
Archeostorie del Friuli Venezia Giulia. Forum Edizioni
,
2017
.
[2]
ValerioCietto
, Cristina Gena, Ilaria Lombardi, Claudio Mattutino, and
ChiaraVaudano
.
Codesigning with kids an educational robot
.
In 2018 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts
,
ARSO2018
, Genova, Italy,
September 27-29
,
2018
, pages
139
{
140
,
2018
.
[3]
GiovanniForlastro
, Cristina Gena, Claudio Mattutino, Elena Quiri, Rita Auriemma, Giuliano De Felice, and
VitoSantacesaria
.
Swiping in the wild: An evaluation in the wild of a storytellingapp for children
.
In Proceedings of the AVI-CH 2018 Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces for Cultural Heritage co-located with 2018 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI2018
), Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy, May
29
,
2018
.,
2018
.
[4]
JuanPablo Hourcade. Child-Computer Interaction
. Paperback,
2015
.
[5]
AmonRapp
, Federica Cena, Cristina Gena, Alessandro Marcengo, and
LucaConsole
.
Using game mechanics for eld evaluation of prototype social applications: a novel methodology
.
Behaviour & IT
, 35(
3
):
184
{
195
,
2016
.