We are happy to share that our seminar/workshop on Digital literacy, multimodality and interculturality in the school curriculum: theories and practices mediated by a storytelling toolkit received 61 registrations and it will take place every Thursday, starting on January 2023 until May 2023.
Temos o prazer de partilhar que a nossa oficina de formação acreditada sobre literacia digital, multimodalidade e interculturalidade no currículo escolar: teorias e práticas mediadas por um conjunto de ferramentas de narração de histórias recebeu 61 inscrições e terá lugar todas as quintas-feiras, de Janeiro de 2023 até Maio de 2023. Follow us on Instragam and Facebook
BEST APP The Mobeybou apps integrated the three finalists for BEST APP at the comKids festival, one of the most relevant festivals on digital media (presentation here)
In the scope of her Master Venicy has carried out field work in Cape Verde with the Mobeybou in Cape Verde app. She took these wonderful photos with young children from a local kindergarten!
On the 21st of February, we had the pleasure of presenting our illustration and animation work at UIVO’s closing event at Fórum da Maia. UIVO is an annual illustration exhibition that gathers the work of national and some international artists and explores the different dimensions of the practice. This year, Gabriela Sá and Ana Paula Caruso – the Mobeybou’s illustrator and animator, respectively – were selected through an open call process to present the visuals they developed for the Mobeybou products. The presentation focused on the constraints and rules of developing visuals for an interactive platform, the relationship between illustrator and animator, and the collaborative process that involves the whole team.
Mobeybou organized a workshop for kindergarten children during the “Semana da Leitura” event at the University of Minho. The children played with the new Mobeybou wireless blocks, the previous Mobeybou system and the Mobeybou in India app. It was great fun and we had extraordinarily positive feedback both from the children and the teachers, who didn’t want to leave. The most enjoyed features in the Mobeybou in India app were the 360º page and the Augmented Reality Experience.
Cristina Sylla, Elena Márquez Segura, Akeiylah DeWitt, Ahmed Sabbir Arif, Eva Irene Brooks
In user studies with children, it is important to use age appropriate evaluation tools to better understand their preferences, opinions, and thoughts. Here, we studied two accepted evaluation tools: The Five Degrees of Happiness, and the Sticky Ladder rating scales; together with the Paper Ladder, a paper version of the latter. Thirty-six preschoolers rated two creative and play activities (painting and construction blocks) and a game (the musical chairs) in terms of difficulty, enjoyment, and preference. Drawing from theories of embodied and distributed cognition, we performed a video analysis of the children’s interactions with these tools, focusing on how each tool supported the children’s cognitive processes and communication with the researcher. Here, we first describe children’s embodied behavior and discuss how these were supported by design features and affordances of the tools. Then, we discuss strengths and shortcomings of each evaluation method. Last, we provide recommendations for their design, appropriation, and usage by researchers developing and evaluating playful solutions and games for children.
– Print a ladder that fits on an A4 paper with wider rungs. This will allow placing tokens together on the same rung;
– Glue the A4 paper with the printed ladder onto a cardboard. It will allow holding the ladder vertically to evoke associations to real live ladders, explaining and understanding the rating method;
– Draw the floor below the ladder, to also strengthen real-world ladder associations.
– Glue the paper pieces with the printed activities onto cardboard cutouts, which are easier to handle, more like objects, more robust, and durable than paper pieces.
Sticky Ladder
– Create rungs that are “velcroable” in their entirety (and not just the center) and long enough to allow several tokens on the same rung.
– Avoid gluing the Velcro onto the cloth as this will not be sturdy enough to endure several placing/removing of the items under evaluation.
Five Degrees of Happiness Rating Scale
– Visualize the activity being rated either through a drawing next to the questionnaire scale, or using tokens (e.g. placing them next to the questionnaire);
– For sustainability reasons, use a tablet to capture answers. Alternatively, a re-usable notebook sized whiteboard.
Cristina Sylla, Elena Márquez Segura, Akeiylah DeWitt, Ahmed Sabbir Arif, Eva Irene Brooks. 2019. Fiddling, Pointing, Hovering, and Sliding: Embodied Actions with Three Evaluation Tools for Children. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
Two members of the Mobeybou team had the chance to participate in Confia 2019, the International Conference in Illustration and Animation, that took place in Viana do Castelo, between June 14th and 16th. You can read our publications in Confia’s proceedings: confia.ipca.pt
Gabriela Sá presenting Visual Development Processes for a Multicultural Storytelling Tool.
Panel where Ana Paula Caruso presented Animating for a Digital Manipulative: how to create restricted action libraries without restricting the players’ creativity.
