Moving Beyond Boundaries – Narrative Learning in the Digital Era
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.
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.
– 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.
– 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
We took the Mobeybou digital prototype to GI Hasseris Skole, in Aalborg, Denmark. With the help of the teacher Michael Skott Jensen, a class of 3rd graders experimented with the tool and gave feedback on how our team could improve it.
All photos were taken by Michael Skott Jensen.
The Mobeybou team took a paper prototype to EB1 São Mamede School, to Prof. Ana Bizarro’s class of 3rd graders. The children explored a collaborative storytelling activity and gave feedback on what elements were relevant for their stories, which ones they enjoyed using the most and how they would manipulate the physical blocks of the future Mobeybou tangible interface.
