Alissa Antle

Simon Fraser University · School of Interactive Arts and Technology

There is a growing interest in HCI to envision, design, and evaluate technology-enabled interventions that support users’ emotion regulation. This interest stems in part from increased recognition that the ability to regulate emotions is critical to mental health, and that a lack of effective emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor for menta...

Child–computer interaction (CCI)¹ is a multidisciplinary field of research that concerns the phenomena surrounding the interaction between children and computational and communication technologies. During the last two decades, several endeavors and contributions have significantly furthered CCI research. The pace of children-relevant technological...

Emotion regulation is foundational to mental health and well-being. In the last decade there has been an increasing focus on the use of interactive technologies to support emotion regulation training in a variety of contexts. However, research has been done in diverse fields and no cohesive framework exists that explicates what features of such sys...

The IDC community has a rich history of developing new methods for involving children in design research. However, few papers discuss developing new remotely facilitated co-design approaches. Fewer still focus on the challenges of eliciting discussion and generating design ideas around subjective experiences involving emotions, feelings, and though...

The global pandemic has brought numerous challenges for designers, researchers, and practitioners whose work involves children and new technologies. While many of us have found creative ways to address the obstacles of facilitating activities with children remotely, inciting critical reflection through making, which is already difficult in in-perso...

There is a growing interest in HCI to envision, design, and evaluate technology-enabled interventions that support users' emotion regulation. This interest stems in part from increased recognition that the ability to regulate emotions is critical to mental health, and that a lack of effective emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor for menta...

Short-video mobile apps are an emergent media form and play a significant role in young children’s everyday lives. We explored the parental perspectives of 2-to-6-year-old Chinese children’s use of short-video mobile apps. We distributed an online questionnaire that received 266 valid responses from parents and conducted in-depth interviews with 20...

This mixed methods study examined the impact of two design strategies on interactional processes in a collaborative tangible-tabletop land-use planning simulation. Twenty pairs of fifth grade children used the simulation to create a world they would want to live in. To investigate the impact of positive interdependence half the pairs were assigned...

In the 21st century the academic field of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) arose alongside burgeoning interactive technology and digital media industries that targeted children. We believe that the field of CCIU is at an important point in its development, analogous to when a child becomes a teen. Over the last few years we have each had many infor...

Driven by the rapid pace of technical innovation in biosensing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and wearable computing, the next generation of smart devices will be worn on-body, eventually becoming implanted. The increasing presence of these new forms of interactive technologies, known as biowearables, in children’s lives poses cri...

Wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) is a carefully planned and organized team operation, requiring collaboration and information sharing between many volunteers who are spread out across various locations in the outdoors. Workers play a variety of roles, both on the ground and at a command post, and they need information and awareness specific to t...

Since the publication of this article [Tanenbaum, K., Hatala, M., Tanenbaum, J. et al. A case study of intended versus actual experience of adaptivity in a tangible storytelling system.

In this article, we present a systematic review of literature on augmented reality (AR) supported for early language learning. We analyzed a total of 53 papers from 2010 to 2019 using qualitative analysis with complementary descriptive quantitative analysis. Our findings revealed three main AR learning activities: word spelling games, word knowledg...

Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is em...

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

EmotoTent is an interactive socio-emotional learning system developed in response to escalating levels of violence, inequality and marginalization in schools seen in the early 21st Century. The system is inspired by advances in biosensing wearables, tattoo displays, brain sensors, robotic agents, artificial intelligence (AI), gestural interaction a...

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children -- both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar ev...

In future, emergency services will increasingly use technology to assist emergency service dispatchers and call taker with information during an emergency situation. One example could be the use of drones for surveying an emergency situation and providing contextual knowledge to emergency service call takers and first responders. The challenge is t...

About 18% of children in industrialized countries suffer from anxiety. We designed a mobile neurofeedback app, called Mind-Full, based on existing design guidelines. Our goal was for young children in lower socio-economic status schools to improve their ability to self-regulate anxiety by using Mind-Full. In this paper we report on quantitative out...

The global refugee crisis is a significant current challenge affecting millions of children. The process of refugee migration comes with major immediate as well as long-term risks to children's physical and mental health, education, and prospects. Despite the multiple dangers and challenges during migration, most refugee families have access to and...

Tangible interaction design students often find it difficult to generate ideas for tangible manipulation. They often restrict their explorations to a few familiar possibilities. To our knowledge, there is no design tool that focuses on facilitating the exploration of a variety of manipulation and aiding generation of ideas for manipulation. To addr...

This paper presents Character Alive, a tangible system designed to improve early Chinese literacy acquisition for Mandarin-speaking children at-risk for dyslexia by enabling high-level interaction. Character Alive uses the multisensory training method to teach children the reading and writing of Chinese characters and words. The core design feature...

Music plays a crucial role in young children's development. Current research lacks the design of an interactive system for younger children that could generate dynamic music change in response to the children's body movement. In this paper, we present the design of bike as an embodied musical instrument for young children 2-5 years old to improve t...

Millions of children have challenges with anxiety that negatively impact their development, education and well-being. To address this challenge, we developed version 2.0 of Mind-Full, a wearable, mobile neurofeedback system, designed to teach young children to learn to self-regulate anxiety. We present a mixed methods evaluation of a seven week lon...

We present a tangible interface for supporting wilderness search-and-rescue (SAR) managers in maintaining awareness of a large SAR incident, where there are numerous field teams searching for a lost person in a wilderness area. This interface consists of physical and digital representations of the search area and elements of the search activity (e....

In the future, emergency calls to the number 9cscwp1 in North America will include the ability to make video calls with 9cscwp1 call centers yet little is known about how to design such technologies, so they map to people's real emergency needs. We explore this design space by investigating systems that can allow 9cscwp1 callers to stream a surrept...

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

Children living in poverty often suffer multiple forms of trauma, which impedes their ability to effectively self-regulate negative emotions, such as anxiety, and to focus their attention. As a result, many of these children struggle at school. Our work explores the effectiveness of using a mindfulness-oriented, neurofeedback-based, brain-computer...

Many researchers have suggested that tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have the potential to support learning for children. While several tangible reading systems have been developed for children, few systems have been designed that explicitly target the first stage of reading where many children struggle, which is the alphabetic principle (letter-so...

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and per...

The wide availability of body-sensing technologies (such as Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect) has the potential to bring full-body interaction to the masses, but the design of hand gestures and body movements that can be easily discovered by the users of such systems is still a challenge. In this paper, we revise and evaluate Framed Guessability,...

Distance separated grandparents and grandchildren often face challenges in staying connected. To explore this topic, we designed G2G, a shared calendar and video messaging system to connect young children (ages 5-10) with their grandparents over distance. Our design focused on providing grandparents and grandchildren with an awareness of each other...

Children's emotional skills are important for their success. However, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders have difficulties in understanding social contexts and recognizing and expressing facial expressions. In this paper, we present the design of EmoStory, a game-based interactive narratives system that supports children's emotional developmen...

This paper presents an augmented reality (AR) system that supports early reading and spelling acquisition of English for children. The design of the AR system was based on and extends our prior tangible reading system called PhonoBlocks. In this paper, we discuss why and how we extend the work from PhonoBlocks to an AR system design. The goal of ou...

One design challenge of tangible reading systems is how to leverage the design of physical properties to best support the learning process. In this paper, we present an exploratory study which investigated how 18 young adults who learn English as a foreign language associated colours and materials to English letter-sound pairs. The preliminary resu...

This SIG will provide child-computer interaction researchers and practitioners an opportunity to discuss topics related to challenges brought about by the increasing ubiquity of computing in children's lives, including the collection, and use of "big data". Topics include control and ownership of children's data, the impact of personalization on in...

The Block Talks toolkit combines the educational potential of tangible computing and augmented reality (AR) technologies to help children learn English sentence construction. Although examples of tangible AR reading systems for children currently exist, few focus specifically on learning sentence structure. Block Talks was developed using ordinary...

Purpose: To investigate the observation that perpetrators of abusive head trauma engage in repeated shakings because shaking "works" to quiet the infant. Methods: Sixty first-time parent couples individually cared for a programmable model infant in two consecutive 7-min trials. After six minutes of consolable followed by inconsolable crying, par...

Brain--computer interface applications (BCIs) utilizing neurofeedback (NF) can make invisible brain states visible in real time. Learning to recognize, modify, and regulate brain states is critical to all children's development and can improve learning, and emotional and mental health outcomes. How can we design usable and effective NF BCIs that he...

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

Sisu is a gamified learning application designed to assist school-aged children who are struggling to read. Sisu utilizes readily-available technology to support the child’s self-directed learning at home, with unique elements tied to the learning experience: (1) a spelling game with (2) an empathic agent, and (3) a mini-game. The empathic agent ut...

Chronic stress is a significant contributor to emotional distress and a myriad of health issues. Standard coping mechanisms for stress and anxiety (e.g., medication, yoga, and therapy) often have significant barriers preventing people from seeking a remedy. A new home-based treatment method using a brain-computer interface provides people with visu...

Children in North America are more likely to suffer from attentional challenges than any other mental health issue. Studies suggest that neurofeedback treatments may be useful for helping these children learn to self-regulate. Applying neurofeedback treatments in real-world, school settings poses a challenge, however, as these environments are ofte...

Most ethics boards classify children as a vulnerable population -- all children. The reason given for this is that children lack the necessary cognitive capacity to decide whether or not to participate in most research. It may be difficult for them to foresee the risks and potential benefits to their own well-being or to understand how the conditio...

Tangibles may be effective for reading applications. Letters can be represented as 3D physical objects. Words are spatially organized collections of letters. We explore how tangibility impacts reading and spelling acquisition for young Anglophone children who have dyslexia. We describe our theory-based design rationale and present a mixed-methods c...

In this paper, we highlight possibilities for designing intangible cultural values into interactions with technologies in heritage spaces. We do this specifically through the design of elwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible table installed in a cultural heritage museum. The tabletop was collaboratively designed to communicate complex and narr...

Many couples live apart due to work, educational situations, or frequent travel. While technology can help mediate these relationships, there is a lack of designs that allow couples to share a sense of touch over distance. We present a design case study of a tangible communication system called Flex- N-Feel--a pair of gloves that allows distance-se...

Long-Distance Relationships (LDRs) are fairly common nowadays where couples rely on computer-mediated tools to stay connected. Yet few systems have explored how couples can share fun and playful activities together over distance. In this paper, we present the design of Puzzle Space, a distributed tangible jigsaw puzzle that allows LDRs to play remo...

Many couples live apart due to work or study reasons, experiencing the challenge of maintaining a long-distance relationship. These couples rely heavily on existing communication technologies, which are limited to textual, verbal, and visual mediums. Our approach was to provide couples with a haptic experience of affective touch through vibrotactil...

Dyslexia is a severe impairment in reading and spelling that affects 10% of children in English-speaking countries. One area of difficulty is learning spelling rules that require attention to other letters within a word (i.e., context): for example, why grapple requires two ps while staple requires one. Poor visual attention contributes to children...

This hands-on workshop introduces a foundation for designing tangibles for children. Participants engage in a low-fidelity design challenge using the iPad Osmo system. We focus on how designing tangibles for children is unique from other design problems and processes. We walk participants through an outcome driven design process using the award win...

The EmbodySuit augmented human system allows students to experience life from the perspectives of different organisms, by virtually and physically becoming birds, spiders, ants and even bacteria. Inspired by current advances in nanorobotics, Star Trek's holodeck and the Magic school bus, Embodysuit makes learning embodied and experiential. The stud...

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have been suggested to have the potential to support learning for children. Despite the increasing number of TUI reading systems there are few design guidelines for children, especially for those with dyslexia (a specific difficulty in language acquisition skills). In this paper we discuss four design opportunities a...

The Story of Things (SoT) system enables children to learn the story behind every object they touch in a typical day. Inspired by Living Media and the Internet of Things (IoT) our goal is to change children's awareness through hands-on interaction with the world they live in. A back-of-the-hand display is activated by stick-on finger sensors when a...

Dyslexia is a severe impairment in reading and spelling that affects 10% of children in English-speaking countries. One area of difficulty is learning spelling rules that require attention to other letters within a word (i.e., context): for example, why grapple requires two ps while staple requires one. Poor visual attention contributes to children...

Our pictorial visually describes ?elәwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible tabletop installed in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The tabletop was designed to communicate the continuity of Musqueam culture, convey the complexity of belongings that were excavated from Musqueam's ancient village site, and reconne...

The ability to view issues through alternate attitudes is an increasingly valuable skill. Persuasive games provide users an opportunity to practice adopting alternate attitudes, but users' pre-existing attitudes can get in the way. Multi-player games can use collaboration to help users overcome their pre-existing attitudes, but techniques for singl...

Tangible user interfaces have the potential to support children in learning to read. This research explores the design space of school-based tangible learning systems that support early reading acquisition in children, particularly in children with reading difficulties. Informed by theories of the causes and interventions for dyslexia and research...

This hands-on workshop introduces a foundation for designing tangibles for children. Participants engage in a low-fidelity design challenge using the iPad Osmo system. We focus on how designing tangibles for children is unique from other design problems and processes. We walk participants through an outcome driven design process using the award win...

We are interested in novel interactive uses of pressure sensors and vibration actuators that can augment the role of physicality for embodied human perception and experience. Specifically, we explore how wearable technology can be used to provide more realistic present-at-body self-awareness in equestrians. Self-awareness of a rider's own physical...

ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings is an interactive tabletop using a tangible user interface to explore intangible cultural heritage. The table was designed for the c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city exhibition. This exhibition is a partnership of three major institutions in Vancouver, BC, examining the significant ancient village site on which part of Vanco...

Physical experiences are frequently used to represent mathematics to children. However, students sometimes fail to transfer performance to symbolic representations of problems. In this paper, we suggest that tangible interfaces can promote transfer by structuring physical experiences. We realize our concept in a system, Button Matrix, that uses cou...

In this paper we describe a neuro-feedback system and applications we designed and deployed to help vulnerable children at an NGO-funded school, called Nepal House Kaski, in Pokhara, Nepal. The system, called Mind-Full, enables traumatized children to learn and practice self-regulation by playing simple, culturally appropriate games using an EEG he...

Mainstream paper and pencil interventions for Anglophone students with dyslexia emphasize a strategy of analyzing syllables to compensate for irregularities in English letter-sound correspondences. Classroom interventions have developed effective scaffolds for supporting students in analyzing syllables in instructional contexts. However, students t...

Mainstream paper and pencil interventions for Anglophone students with dyslexia emphasize a strategy of analyzing syllables to compensate for irregularities in English letter-sound correspondences. Classroom interventions have developed effective scaffolds for supporting students in analyzing syllables in instructional contexts. However, students t...

Video games are well known for their interactive aspects. Through gameplay, players are given options to control characters, perform actions, and make decisions. These interactions typically impact a player's degree of success at the game. In games with characters and narratives, the interactions might even inform the player of character traits and...

Designers of natural user interfaces are faced with several challenges when creating interaction models for controlling applications, including the wide range of possible input actions and the lack of affordances, which they can use to design controls. In order to contribute to the development of design guidelines in this design space, we conducted...