Browsing by Author "Druin, Allison"
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Item Accuracy, Target Reentry and Fitts' Law Performance of Preschool Children Using Mice(2003-06-04) Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Druin, Allison; Guimbretiere, FrancoisSeveral experiments by psychologists and human factors researchers have shown that when young children execute pointing tasks, they perform at levels below older children and adults. However, these experiments were not conducted with the purpose of providing guidelines for the design of graphical user interfaces. To address this need, we conducted a study to gain a better understanding of 4 and 5 year-old children's use of mice. We compared the performance of thirteen 4 year-olds, thirteen 5 year-olds and thirteen young adults in point-and-click tasks. As expected, we found age had a significant effect on accuracy, target reentry and Fitts' law's index of performance. We also found that target size had a significant effect on accuracy and target reentry. Measuring movement time at four different times (first entering target, last entering target, pressing button, releasing button) yielded the result tha Fitts' law models children well only for the first time they enter the target. Another interesting result was that using the adjusted index of difficulty (IDe) in Fitts' law calculations yielded lower linear regression correlation coefficients than using the unadjusted index of difficulty (ID). These results provide valuable guidelines for the design of graphical user interfaces for young children, in particular when it comes to sizing visual targets. They also suggest designers should adopt strategies to accommodate users with varying levels of skill. (UMIACS-2003-42) (HCIL-2003-16)Item Building KidPad: An Application for Children's Collaborative Storytelling(2003-06-04) Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Druin, AllisonCollaborating in small groups can be beneficial to children's learning and socializing. However, there is currently little computer support for children's collaborative activities. This was our motivation for building KidPad, a collaborative storytelling tool for children. KidPad provides children with drawing, typing, and hyperlinking capabilities in a large, two-dimensional canvas. It supports collaboration by accepting input from multiple mice. In building KidPad, we developed solutions to problems common to all single-display groupware applications for children: obtaining input from multiple devices, and using an intuitive user interface metaphor that can support collaboration. Our solution for obtaining input from multiple devices was MID, an architecture written in Java. We addressed the need for an appropriate user interface metaphor byusing the local tools metaphor. This paper describes our work on MID and local tools in the context of building of KidPad, and aims to provide developers with valuable insights into how to develop collaborative applications for children. (UMIACS-TR-2003-44) (HCIL-2003-18)Item Chapter 3: Children as Our Technology Design Partners+(1998-10-15) Druin, Allison; Bederson, Ben; Boltman, Angela; Miura, Adrian; Knotts-Callahan, Debby; Platt, Mark"That's silly!" "I'm bored!" "I like that!" "Why do I have to do this?" "What is this for?" These are all important responses and questions that come from children. As our design partners in developing new technologies, children can offer bluntly honest views of their world. They have their own likes, dislikes, and needs that are not the same as adults' (Druin, Stewart, Proft, Bederson, & Hollan, 1997). As the development of new technologies for children becomes commonplace in industry and university research labs, children's input into the design and development process is critical. We need to establish new development methodologies that enable us to stop and listen, and learn to collaborate with children of all ages. In the chapter that follows, a discussion of new research methodologies will be presented. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-20)Item Children's storytelling technologies: Differences in elaboration and recall(2003-01-21) Boltman, Angela; Druin, AllisonThis paper is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by Angela Boltman in partial fulfillment of a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park. This study could not have been accomplished without the generous funding of the European Union's Experimental Schools Environments initiative (project 29310) and the assistance of members of "KidStory", a three-year research team that focused on creating storytelling technologies for young children. We would particularly like to acknowledge Benjamin Bederson and Juan Pablo Hourcade, our colleagues at the University of Maryland and chief architects of the KidPad technology. We would like to thank Allison Farber, who recreated the book images in KidPad for this study. Our colleagues Carina Fast and Marita Kjellin at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Danae Stanton, Sue Cobb, and Claire O'Malley at the University of Nottingham supported the study in many ways. In addition, we would like to thank Steve Benford from the University of Nottingham and Yngve Sundblad from the Royal Institute of Technology for their project leadership and continual support of our research. We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Melanie Killen at the University of Maryland as an ever-patient reviewer of this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the children in England and Sweden who participated in the study and who taught us a great deal about storytelling. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Allison Druin at the University of Maryland, 3180 A.V. Williams Building, College Park, Maryland 20782 or electronically at allisond@umiacs.umd.edu. Abstract This study examined the elaboration and recall of children's stories through an analysis of the content and structure of children's retelling of a wordless picture book. The book was presented to 72 children (ages 6-7) in England and Sweden. Using a between subjects design, each child was presented with either a paper version of the picture book, a computer presentation with traditional hyperlinks, or a computer presentation with panning and zooming. The technology that was used was KidPad, a children's spatial storytelling application (Druin et al., 1997). Results revealed that the computer presentation with panning and zooming offered benefits in elaboration and recall by means of more complex story structure and a greater understanding of initiating events and goals. (UMIACS-TR-2001-87) (HCIL-TR-2001-25)Item A Collaborative Digital Library for Children: A Descriptive Study of Children's Collaborative Behavior and Dialogue(2003-01-21) Druin, Allison; Revelle, Glenda; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Farber, Allison; Lee, Juhyun; Campbell, DanaOver the last three years, we have been developing a collaborative digital library interface where two children can collaborate using multiple mice on a single computer to access multimedia information concerning animals. This technology, called "SearchKids" leverages our lab's past work in co-present collaborative zoomable interfaces for young children. This paper describes the differences in children's collaborative behavior and dialogue when using two different software conditions to search for animals in the digital library. In this study, half the children had to "confirm" their collaborative activities (e.g., both children had to click on a given area to move to that area). The other half used an "independent" collaboration technique (e.g., just one mouse click allows the pair to move to that area). The participants in this study were 98 second and third grade children (ages 7-9 years old) from a suburban public elementary school in Prince George's County, Maryland. The children were randomly divided into two groups and paired with a classmate of the same gender. Each pair was asked to find as many items as possible from a list of 20 items given a limit of 20 minutes. Sessions were video taped and the first and last five minutes of each session were coded for discussion type and frequency. The results of our study showed distinct differences between groups in how children discussed their shared goals, collaborative tasks, and what outcomes they had in successfully finding multimedia information in the digital library. These findings suggest various ways educators might use and technologists might develop new collaborative technologies for learning. Keywords Children, Collaboration, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Digital Libraries, Educational Applications, Single Display Groupware (SDG), SearchKids, Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) (UMIACS-TR-2002-46) (HCIL-TR-2002-07)Item Designing a Collaborative Finger Painting Application for Children(2000-10-06) Browne, Hilary; Bederson, Ben; Druin, Allison; Sherman, Lisa; Westerman, WayneWe describe the design and implementation of a collaborative, computer-based finger painting program for children using a new hardware input device called a Multi-Touch Surface (MTS). The MTS uses a flat surface about the size of a keyboard to track multiple, simultaneous finger motions, which we transform into paint strokes on a screen. We describe related work and explain how our program design was guided by the suggestions of children. We discuss the hardware and software of the MTS and the challenges of designing our program. Finally, we present the Finger Painting Table, a collaborative, embedded application built using the MTS, and discuss future work. KEYWORDS: Multi-Touch Surface, Finger Painting, Children, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Educational Application, Single Display Groupware (SDG) (Also corss-referenced as HCIL-TR-2000-17) (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-66)Item Designing an Interactive Message Board as a Technology Probe for Family Communication(2001-10-10) Browne, Hilary; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Plaisant, Catherine; Druin, AllisonIn this paper, we describe the design issues and technical implementation of an interactive Family Message Board. The Family Message Board enables members of a distributed family to communicate with one another both synchronously and asynchronously via simple, pen-based, digital notes. Each household running thi$ Java-based software can view, create, and manipulate notes in a zoomable space. The Family Message Board will be used as a technology probe to help us unders$ the communication needs of distributed families, and to help us design new devi$ to meet those needs.Item Designing StoryRooms: Interactive Storytelling Spaces for Children(2000-02-24) Alborzi, Houman; Druin, Allison; Montemayor, Jaime; Sherman, Lisa; Taxn, Gustav; Best, Jack; Hammer, Joe; Kruskal, Alex; Lal, Abby; Schwenn, Thomas Plaisant; Sumida, Lauren; Wagner, Rebecca; Hendler, JimLimited access to space, costly props, and complicated authoring technologies are among the many reasons why children can rarely enjoy the experience of authoring room-sized interactive stories. Typically in these kinds of environments, children are restricted to being story participants, rather than story authors. Therefore, we have begun the development of "StoryRooms," room-sized immersive storytelling experiences for children. With the use of low-tech and high-tech storytelling elements, children can author physical storytelling experiences to share with other children. In the paper that follows, we will describe our design philosophy, design process with children, the current technology implementation and example StoryRooms. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-06)Item Designing Storytelling Technologies to Encourage Collabortion Between Young Children(1999-12-08) Benford, Steve; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Akesson, Karl-Petter; Bayon, Victor; Druin, Allison; Hansson, Par; Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Ingram, Rob; Neale, Helen; O'Malley, Claire; Simsarian, Kristian T.; Stanton, Danae; Sundblad, Yngve; Taxen, GustavWe describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-76)Item Family Calendar Survey(2003-01-21) Hutchinson, Hilary; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Plaisant, Catherine; Druin, AllisonBeginning in late July 2002, we conducted a survey about people's personal and family calendaring habits. By the end of September, we had over 400 responses, which are summarized below. The survey was conducted to help inform our work in designing new technologies for families, motivated in part by our work on the interLiving project. InterLiving is a 3 year, European Union-funded project where we work with distributed, multi-generational families as design partners to create new technologies (see http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/interliving for details). The survey was administered from a web page (https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hilary/survey/survey.htm), and participants were solicited via a "chain-mail" email approach. We began by sending a request to fill out a survey to our friends, families, and colleagues. We asked that they forward the request on to their friends, family and colleagues as well. While we realize that this was an imperfect approach, we believed that the respondents would be representative of the users we are initially targeting in our research on family calendaring and coordination - individuals who are already making relatively heavy use of computers at home and/or work. The results seem to validate this assumption. Many of our respondents likely come from the HCI community as the mailing went to our large lab mailing list. We may have some pollution in the data as a result of people in the same household (e.g. husband and wife) both filling out the survey. Despite these issues, the results we got were helpful in eliciting a number of important findings, namely that people rely on multiple calendars, many of which are still paper. (UMIACS-TR-2002-92) (HCIL-TR-2002-21)Item Future of Information Alliance 2011 Launch Day Five: Science in Our Lives(2011-11-18) Aldoory, Linda; Buchanan, Robert; Chinoy, Ira; Chowdhury, Abdur; Czerwinski, Mary; Druin, Allison; Espy-Wilson, Carol; Palmer, Margaret; Russell, Dan; Sita, LawrenceThis program explored the movement of information generated in realms of scientific expertise across not only disciplinary lines but into the realms of personal life and public policy, where specialized knowledge can have enormous impact in such areas as health literacy, communication, food safety, and the environment. Questions asked during the presentation included: What are the challenges in translation from one information culture to another? Where are the opportunities? The program featured a panel of accomplished faculty members (Aldoory, Buchanan, Espy-Wilson, Palmer) who discussed these issues with "Visiting Future-ists" Chowdhury, Czerwinski and Russell.Item Future of Information Alliance 2011 Launch Day Four: Transparency and Boundaries(2011-11-17) Bederson, Ben; Chinoy, Ira; Chowdhury, Abdur; Czerwinski, Mary; Druin, Allison; Jaeger, Paul; Khamis, Sahar; Parks, Sheri; Russell, DanThis program explored both the promise and peril of an era in which free-flowing information raises issues of security, privacy, ownership, in which the response of governments has included both improved access and obstacles to transparency, and in which the use of social media has been been able to breach the walls erected by repressive regimes in some places but not in others. The program featured a panel of accomplished faculty members (Bederson, Khamis and Jaeger) with expertise ranging from e-government to mobile computing to the role of social media in the unfolding "Arab Spring." Following their presentations, the speakers discussed the issues of transparency and boundaries with "Visiting Future-ists" Chowdhury, Czerwinski and Russell.Item Future of Information Alliance 2011 Launch Day One: Visiting Future-ists(2011-11-14) Chinoy, Ira; Czerwinski, Mary; Druin, Allison; O’Shea, Patrick; Russell, Dan; Chowdhury, AbdurPresenters at the program were three “Visiting Future-ists”: Dan Russell, Google's "director of user happiness," who leads efforts to improve the effectiveness of web searching and keynote speaker at the campus-wide Future of Information Forum held in November 2010; Mary Czerwinski, who manages the research on human-computer interaction at Microsoft and focuses on information visualization, group awareness and lifelogging; and Abdur Chowdhury, former chief scientist at Twitter, who has been working toward improving the ability to separate "signal" from "noise" in the explosion of information on the Web. The Visiting Future-ists described their work in helping to innovate for the future information environment, and discussed the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. They also engaged the audience in brainstorming aimed at identifying information-related issues that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary research.Item Future of Information Alliance 2011 Launch Day Three: Creativity and Culture(2011-11-16) Chinoy, Ira; Chowdhury, Abdur; Czerwinski, Mary; Druin, Allison; Elahi, Hasan; Epstein, Asher; Mabbs, Linda; Russell, Dan; Smiley, Leigh WilsonThis program cast a wide net -- from performance to art to entrepreneurship -- in considering the information-seeking and sharing activities involved in creative endeavors. Faculty members Elahi, Epstein and Wilson Smiley made presentations about what they saw as the role of information in creativity, and talked with "Visiting Future-ists" Chowdhury, Czerwinski and Russell about the challenges and opportunities ahead at the intersection of information, creativity and culture.Item How Young Can Our Design Partners Be?(2002-09-18) Farber, Allison; Druin, Allison; Chipman, Gene; Julian, Dawn; Somashekhar, SheilaFor this work-in-progress presentation, we report on our experiences working with young children as technology design partners. Our team from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab has extensive participatory design experience in working with 7-11 year old children. Here we describe our first year working with 4-6 year old children and the ways that we altered our methodologies to meet the unique needs of our younger design partners. (Also UMIACS-TR-2002-76) (Also HCI-TR-2002-13)Item The International Children's Digital Library: Description and Analysis of First Use(2003-01-21) Druin, Allison; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Weeks, Ann; Farber, Allison; Grosjean, Jesse; Guha, Mona Leigh; Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Lee, Juhyun; Liao, Sabrina; Reuter, Kara; Rose, Anne; Takayama, Yoshifumi; Zhang, LinglingIn this paper we describe the first version of the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). As a five-year research project, its mission is to enable children to access and read an international collection of children's books through the development of new interface technologies. This paper will describe the need for such research, our work in the context of other digital libraries for children, and an initial analysis of the first seven weeks of the ICDL's public use on the web. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.7 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Digital Libraries - Dissemination, User Issues; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Graphical User Interfaces (UMIACS-TR-2003-04) (HCIL-TR-2003-02)Item The International Children's Digital Library: Viewing Digital Books Online(2003-01-21) Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Druin, Allison; Rose, Anne; Farber, Allison; Takayama, YoshifumiReading books plays an important role in children's cognitive and social development. However, many children do not have access to diverse collections of books due to the limited resources of their community libraries. We have begun to address this issue by creating a large-scale digital archive of children's books, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). In this paper we discuss our initial efforts in building the ICDL, concentrating on an informal evaluation of innovative digital book readers. Keywords Children, digital libraries, books, book readers, graphical user interfaces. (UMIACS-TR-2002-09) (HCIL-TR-2002-03)Item The International Children's Library: Viewing Digital Books Online(2003-06-04) Hourcade, Juan Pablo; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Druin, Allison; Rose, Anne; Farber, Allison; Takayama, YoshifumiReading books plays an important role in children's cognitive and social development. However, many children do not have access to diverse collections of books due to the limited resources of their community libraries. We have begun to address this issue by creating a large-scale digital archive of children's books, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). In this paper we discuss our initial efforts in building the ICDL, concentrating on the design of innovative digital book readers. (UMIACS-TR-2003-43) (HCIL-2003-17)Item PETS: A Personal Teller of Stories(1999-11-23) Montemayor, Jaime; Druin, Allison; Hendler, JimLet us start by reading a story written by a seven year old child, entitled Michelle. "There once was a robot named Michelle. She was new in the neighborhood. She was HAPPY when she first came, thinking she would make friends. But it was the opposite. Other robots threw rocks and sticks. She was SAD. Now no one liked her. One day she was walking down a street, a huge busy one, when another robot named Rob came up and ask [sic] if she wanted to have a friend. She was SCARED at first but then realized that she was HAPPY. The other robots were ANGRY but knew that they had learned their lesson. Michelle and Rob lived HAPPILY ever after. No one noticed the dents from rocks that stayed on Michelle." (Druin, Research notes, August 1998) This is just one of many stories that children have written with the help of PETS (Druin et al. 1999a). The author of Michelle did not just write this moving story; she is also an integral member of the team that built our robots. As you read on, PETS will be further described. Our motivations behind building such an interactive robotic pet will also be discussed. In addition, the process of how we made this robotic technology with our team of adults and six children will be introduced. And with this, we will present cooperative inquiry (Druin 1999a), the methodology that we embrace as we discover insights about technology, education, science, engineering, and art. Finally, this chapter will close with reflections on what was learned from on-going research effort. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-67)Item Physical Programming: Designing Tools for Children to Create Physical Interactive Environments(2001-10-10) Montemayor, Jaime; Druin, Allison; Farber, Allison; Simms, Sante; Churaman, Wayne; D'Amour, Allisonen. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-67, HCIL-TR-2001-21)