Allison Druin

• University of Maryland, College Park

Parents use mobile monitoring software to observe and restrict their children's activities in order to minimize the risks associated with Internet-enabled mobile devices. As children are stakeholders in such technologies, recent research has called for their inclusion in its design process. To investigate children's perceptions of parental mobile m...

Internet search is one of the major activities that American adults engage in online. Building on studies of youth Internet search roles, this paper investigates adults' online information seeking processes within the home. Through in-home interviews and observations of search task performance with 40 adult participants, we identify and describe ch...

The direct gains children perceive from their membership on Participatory Design (PD) teams are seldom the focus of research studies. Yet, how HCI practitioners choose to include children in PD methods may influence the value participants see in their participation, and thereafter the outcomes of PD processes. To understand what gains former child...

Participatory Design (PD) gives users a voice in the design of technologies they are meant to use. When PD methods are adapted for research with children, design teams need to address additional issues of ethical accountability (e.g., adult-child power relations). While researchers have taken measures to ensure ethical accountability in PD research...

Child Computer Interaction is a community within CHI that has been steadily growing. It hosts its own annual IDC conference and is a highly recognizable and vibrant contributor to the ACM CHI conference. In 2015, the CCI SIG aims to take advantage of the positioning of CHI in Seoul to consider how it might, as an academic community, best direct its...

Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab conducted three studies spanning five years by visiting the homes of participants to investigate how children and adolescents search on the Internet. This chapter describes how the authors approached an exploratory research study by drawing from broad methods, including Grou...

Download Free Sample Searching the Internet and the ability to competently use search engines are increasingly becoming an important part of children’s daily lives. Whether mobile or at home, children use search interfaces to explore personal interests, complete academic assignments, and have social interaction. However, engaging with search also m...

This paper presents insights from designers of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) regarding the design tactics they employ to integrate participatory storytelling and "authentic fiction" into the transmedia experiences they create. Our approach was motivated by recent efforts in HCI to more closely align the development of interaction design theory to...

This paper presents a curated collection of fictional abstracts for papers that could appear in the proceedings of the 2039 CHI Conference. It provides an opportunity to consider the various visions guiding work in HCI, the futures toward which we (believe we) are working, and how research in the field might relate with broader social, political, a...

Children are fast becoming a large user-segment of new technologies in the world. We believe that it is critical that the HCI community continue to lead the way in supporting the best possible design of technology for children. To this end, this course will offer a balance of traditional lecture and hands-on design activities, and will cover techni...

In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down.

Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab conducted three studies spanning five years by visiting the homes of participants to investigate how children and adolescents search on the Internet. This chapter describes how the authors approached an exploratory research study by drawing from broad methods, including Grou...

Stories are an important part of children's social and cognitive development and can be an integral part of their lives. In this paper, we share a short synopsis of Mobile Stories, one of the narrative systems we have developed with and for children. We also share lessons we have learned while designing, developing, and evaluating Mobile Stories. I...

Rule-bound, Domain-specific, and Visual Searchers have more apparent differences from each other than similarities, making their grouping somewhat counterintuitive. However, searchers in these three roles are notably more skilled than Non-motivated or Distracted Searchers, and yet lag far behind Power and Social Searchers (see Chapter 5). Rule-boun...

The roles of Social and Power form a final grouping focused around the high level of search skill displayed by children searching. These two roles overlap heavily, with many children falling into both roles. Social Searchers are less skilled than Power Searchers, although still are notably skilled in their own right. Children in both roles are furt...

As searchers, some children can be distinguished from others primarily by their emotional reaction to the experience of searching. Although manifested quite differently in their level of enthusiasm, children in the roles of Developing and Non-motivated have highly noticeable affective responses when seeking information. Developing Searchers are not...

Since 2008, at the University of Maryland we have explored how children search the Internet (Druin et al., 2009, 2010; Foss et al., 2012, 2013; Foss, 2014). We conducted the first iteration of our research with 83 children, and returned to 50 of the same participants approximately 4 years later to examine searching changes in the home context. Our...

Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Audrey Desjardins, Editor

Today's mobile devices are equipped with a variety of tools that enable users to capture and share their daily experiences. However, designing authoring tools that effectively integrate the discrete media-capture components of mobile devices to enable rich expression—especially by children—remains a challenge. Evaluating such tools authentically, a...

Today’s mobile devices are equipped with a variety of tools that enable users to capture and share their daily experiences. However, designing authoring tools that effectively integrate the discrete media-capture components of mobile devices to enable rich expression---especially by children---remains a challenge. Evaluating such tools authenticall...

This paper discusses the challenges inherent in conducting field research with young participants. Based on a series of three studies with children ranging in age from 7-17 as examples, the paper contains descriptions of participant recruitment approaches and challenges. Also included is a discussion of issues surrounding the retention of participa...

Cooperative Inquiry is a Participatory Design method that involves children (typically 7-11 years old) as full partners with adults in the design of technologies intended for use by children. For many years, child designers have worked together with adults in Cooperative Inquiry approaches. However, in the past children have not typically initiated...

Researchers often utilize the method of Participatory Design to work together with users to enhance technology. In particular, Cooperative Inquiry is a method of Participatory Design with children that involves full partnership between researchers and children. One important challenge designers face in creating learning technologies is that these t...

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a form of transmedia storytelling that engages players in scavenger hunt-like missions to collectively uncover, interpret, and reassemble the fragments of a story that is distributed across multiple media, platforms, and locations. ARGs are participatory experiences, because players have a central role in reconstr...

In this paper, we present a framework that describes commonly used design techniques for Participatory Design with children. Although there are many currently used techniques for designing with children, researchers working in differing contexts and in a changing technological landscape find themselves facing difficult design situations. The Octora...

Since its creation, the Cooperative Inquiry method of designing technology with and for children has been refined, expanded, and sometimes questioned. Cooperative Inquiry has been adopted and used widely throughout the world, and it continues to evolve and grow to meet current needs. This paper examines the origins of Cooperative Inquiry, discusses...

The challenges encountered in building the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), a freely available online library of children's literature are described. These challenges include selecting and processing books from different countries, handling and presenting multiple languages simultaneously, and addressing cultural differences. Unlike...

In this paper, we present an in-home observation and in context research study investigating how 38 adolescents aged 14-17 search on the Internet. We present the search trends adolescents display and develop a framework of search roles that these trends help define. We compare these trends and roles to similar trends and roles found in prior work w...

Given the rapid evolution of social networks and online communities, interest in participatory cultures—online and offline social spaces with low barriers to entry and support for creating and sharing knowledge—is increasing. Design-based research (DBR) that invites children to share in the process of designing the technologies that support their l...

Face-to-face design with child and adult design partners is not always possible due to distant geographical locations or time differences. Yet we believe that the designs of children in areas not co-located with system builders, or who live in locations not easily accessed, are just as important and valid as children who are easily accessible espec...

Children often report that school science is boring and abstract. For this reason, we have developed Life-relevant Learning (LRL) environments to help learners understand the relevance that scientific thinking, processes, and experimentation can have in their everyday lives. In this paper, we detail findings that aim to increase our understanding o...

In this presentation, we offer an approach to designing supporting technologies for science learning in everyday informal contexts. We advocate for Cooperative Inquiry as a means of engaging learners in the development and design of their learning activities and supporting tools. Our participatory design approach focuses on actively engaging resea...

As the field of information studies has matured into a broad interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary field of study, the expectations for and range of students seeking doctoral education have evolved significantly. However, the majority of information studies pedagogical literature continues to focus on the master's level. Building upon efforts of...

This special interest group provides the forum for an unofficial gathering of the Child-Computer Interaction community for CHI 2012. Its aim is to provide a venue for structured discussions and networking. Particularly, it aims to support newcomers to this community and to CHI 2012, to acquire an overview of people, topics, and trends that are acti...

We describe the first iteration of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designed to lead players into a newly enfranchised relationship with history and engage them in scientific thinking and information literacy practices. We found that the points at which the game's mythology blurred the lines between fact and fiction prompted middle school students t...

As new technologies emerge that can bring older adults together with children, little has been discussed by researchers concerning the design methods used to create these new technologies. Giving both children and older adults a voice in a shared design process comes with many challenges. This paper details an exploratory study focusing on connecti...

In recent years, many technological interventions have surfaced, such as virtual worlds, games, and digital labs, that aspire to link young people’s interest in media technology and social networks to learning about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) areas. Despite the tremendous interest surrounding young people and STEM education,...

This paper discusses design iterations of mobile stories – a mobile technology that empowers children to collaboratively read and create stories. We present the design and discuss the impact of different collocated collaborative configurations for mobile devices including content splitting and space sharing. We share design experiences that illustr...

This paper presents the results of a large-scale, qualitative study conducted in the homes of children aged 7, 9, and 11 investigating Internet searching processes on Google. Seven search roles, representing distinct behavior patterns displayed by children when interacting with the Google search engine are described, including Developing Searchers,...

Large scale online environments, such as social networks, present an emerging phenomenon where millions of people come together online to share and consume information and socialize. In the past, ethnography was used extensively to provide a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and humans. The ways of "doing ethnography" hav...

We review the first iteration of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designed to engage middle school students in the interpretive process behind history and the mathematical roots of cryptography and cartography. Building from the core characteristic of ARGs as collaborative sense-making systems, we sought to integrate elements of effective cooperativ...

In today's media-rich world, youths are not merely consumers, but also active creators of information. Digital tools allow authors to more easily remix and copy previous works. These new media practices have brought issues of appropriation, copyright, privacy, information behavior, and information literacy to the forefront. In this paper, we presen...

Students often find science to be disconnected from their everyday lives. One reason for this disengagement is that learners are often not given the chance to choose how to pursue their personal goals using science reasoning. Therefore, we are creating science programs that emphasize life-relevant learning -the ability to engage science learners in...

Mobile technologies offer novel opportunities for children to express themselves in-context, seamlessly, without disrupting the flow of their formal learning activities or informal play. Most contemporary mobile devices are equipped with multimedia support that can be used to create multimodal stories that represent the rich life narratives childre...

This paper addresses how children can collaborate by leveraging the ubiquity of mobile devices. Specifically we investigate how children (ages 8--9) read and share children's stories using two collaborative configurations: content splitting and space sharing. Content splitting is where interface pieces (e.g. words, pictures) are split between two o...

Over the past 15 years, children have become more integrally involved in the design of their technology. In this paper, we present the idea that design partnering methods, specifically Cooperative Inquiry, used for designing technology with children can and should now be extended into informal and formal educational settings.

The growth of online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-In has transformed the way in which individuals establish and maintain relationships for both business and entertainment. In this paper we present the analysis of a similar online social network that was used to foster cross-cultural awareness among users ages 14--17. The so...

Concurrent collaboration is a critical skill for cognitive and social development. Tangible Flags is a system designed to facilitate collaboration and exploration, and bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. The system enables children to tag an item of interest in the real world with a flag, scan the flag, and create a corresponding d...

Over the past fifteen years, the discipline of Child Computer Interaction has been steadily growing. As the community matures and as methods and processes are refined, and become situated, there is an urgent need to start to develop a theory around CCI that can be used with some confidence by the research community. The CCI Community SIG at CHI is...

In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down.

In this video we describe Layered Elaboration techniques and their use in the cooperative inquiry method.

In this panel, academic, non-profit, and industry professionals will ask, what does the future hold for "child-computer interaction?" Panelists will explore such issues as how new mobile, social, and ubiquitous technologies change children's future patterns of searching, exploration, and expression of information; how learning environments will be...

The purpose of this Panel is to discuss and elaborate on testing and evaluation challenges facing the designers of new and novel information systems for children. Since 2002, ASIST has hosted 16 papers, panels, and posters on information retrieval systems, digital libraries, and user interfaces for children, but very little discussion has been devo...

We introduce a design technique, Clear Panels, to design interactive mobile device applications. Using mixed-fidelity prototyping, a combination of low- and high-tech materials, participants refine multiple aspects of a mobile application's design. Clear Panels supports writing and sketching via a transparent overlay affixed atop a mobile device sc...

While there is a wealth of information about children's technology and the design processes used to create it, there is a dearth of information regarding how the children who participate in these design processes may be affected by their participation. In this paper, we motivate why studying this impact is important and look at the foundation provi...

This paper discusses design iterations of Mobile Stories - a mobile technology that empowers children to collaboratively read and create stories. We present the design and discuss the impact of different collocated collaborative configurations for mobile devices including: content splitting and space sharing. We share design experiences that illust...

Children want to find information about their world, but there are barriers to finding what they seek. Young people have varying abilities to formulate complex queries and comprehend search results. Challenges in understanding where to type, confusion about what tools are available, and frustration with how to parse the results page all have led to...

An intergenerational design team of children (ages 7-11 years old) along with graduate students and faculty in computer science and information studies developed a programming language for children, Toque. Concrete real-world cooking scenarios were used as programming metaphors to support an accessible programming learning experience. The Wiimote a...

Both handwriting recognition systems and their users are error prone. Handwriting recognizers make recognition errors, and users may miss those errors when verifying output. As a result, it is common for recognized documents to contain residual errors. ...

Mobile technologies offer novel opportunities for children to express themselves in-context, seamlessly, without disrupting the flow of their formal learning activities or informal play. Most contemporary mobile devices are equipped with multimedia support that can be used to create multimodal stories that represent the rich life narratives childre...

As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on "Layered Elaboration," a co-design technique developed over the past year. Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in whic...

As the ¡ School movement has begun to bring together education and research from library and information science and other related disciplines, there is a need to evaluate the best ways to prepare doctoral students to succeed in this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary environment. In May 2009, the University of Maryland hosted the first Worksh...

This chapter discusses experience in adapting and enhancing digital books, small-screen reading, in-context story creation, and collaborative storytelling for mobile platforms. It presents the current research landscape; the interface approaches chosen; the codesign methods used with children as our partners; the design challenges encountered; and...

This paper reports on an adaption of the existing PopoutText and ClearText display techniques to mobile phones. It explains the design rationale for a freely available iPhone application to read books from the International Children's Digital Library. Through a combination of applied image processing, a zoomable user interface, and a process of wor...

Children are among the most frequent users of the Internet, yet searching and browsing the web can present many challenges. Studies over the past two decades on how children search were conducted with finite and pre- determined content found in CD-ROM applications, online digital libraries, and web directories. However, with the current popularity...

Informal educational experiences with grandparents and other older adults can be an important component of children"s education, especially in circumstances where high quality educational services and facilities are not readily available. Mobile devices offer unique capabilities to support such interactions. We report on an ongoing participatory de...

This panel aims to promote the application of Multi Lingual Information Access (MLIA) technologies in digital libraries. MLIA has been recognized as an important issue for digital libraries since the early days of research and development of these projects. This panel will give an overview of the issues involved in creating MLIA for digital Librari...

Today visual search tools are being used by children in Canada and Mongolia, and college students in the US. These diverse users each have their own needs, expectations, and uses for visual search and the results of such searches. This panel will address issues relating to visual search in diverse environments with various ages of users. The techno...

Mobile devices have changed, and continue to shape, the world in which we live. When these devices were first introduced they were most often used in isolation to schedule appointments, take notes, play games, or view or edit pictures and stories. The extent of the collaboration on these mobile devices was to make phone calls, which has led to thei...

In this panel, academic, non-profit, and industry professionals will discuss their global perspectives on mobile technologies for the world's children. Panelists will explore such issues concerning children's access to mobile devices, the decreasing age that children have access to these technologies, mobile innovations for learning, and challenges...

The landscape of childhood in the 21st century increasingly involves technology. As information and communication technologies (ICTs) become ubiquitous in homes, schools, libraries, and play spaces, children are plugged-in and online with greater frequency and at a younger age. Concerns regarding new and emerging technologies like the immersive Int...

The Internet has led to an explosion of users throughout the world. Low-cost computing options are now emerging for developing countries that are changing the world's educational landscape. Given these conditions, there is a critical need to understand the obstacles and opportunities in designing and deploying technologies for children worldwide. T...

As the capabilities of smartphones and similar mobile devices advance, opportunities increase to use them for meaningful creative tasks. Incorporating text, images, and sounds in documents is commonplace when using desktop office or graphics software. However, multimedia authoring interfaces for mobile devices remain undeveloped. Working with a par...

In this roundtable discussion, we will identify challenges and brainstorm opportunities for PhD education in the new i-school movement.

In order to design for children with special needs, we need to design with children with special needs. The inclusionary model proposed in this paper suggests that appropriate involvement of children with special needs in the design process begins with the level of involvement a team expects from children, and is additionally influenced by the natu...

Some of the strategies that are used by companies in the online designing of toys according to the needs of the children has been discussed. Webkinz is a convergent toy that is introduced by a Toronto-based company Ganz. Children 6 to 13 years old access an online environment via password that is provided through the purchase of a stuffed animal. T...

Elementary-age children (ages 6-11) are among the largest user groups of computers and the Internet. Therefore, it is important to design searching and browsing tools that support them. However, many interfaces for children do not consider their skills and preferences. Children are capable of creating Boolean queries using category browsers, but ha...

The use of computers for human-to-human communication among adults has been studied for many years, but using computer technology to enable children from all over the world to talk to each other has rarely been discussed by researchers. The goal of our research is to fill this gap and explore the design and evaluation of children’s cross-language o...

This paper presents a case study of 12 children who used the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) over four years and live in one of four countries: Germany, Honduras, New Zealand, and the United States. By conducting interviews, along with collecting drawings and book reviews, this study describes these children's interests in books, li...

This paper develops a model of children's storytelling using Physically-Oriented Technology (SPOT). The SPOT model draws upon literature regarding current physical storytelling technologies and was developed using a grounded theory approach to qualitative research. This empirical work focused on the experiences of 18 children, ages 5-6, who worked...

This session relates directly to this year's conference theme Sparking Synergies: Bringing Research and Practice Together as it brings together researchers from different disciplines (information science and educational technology) to discuss current issues and trends related to Web usage across student populations. “Complex design problems require...

“;Emotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems—the emotional system changes how the cognitive system operates.” (Norman, 2004: 18). Affective variables drive cognitive information behavior through a person's interests, motivation, feelings, and persistence. Recent research suggests that uncertainty contributes to cognitive l...

We describe the design and use of a system facilitating the sharing of calendar information between remotely located, multi-generational family members. Most previous work in this area involves software enabling younger family members to monitor their parents. We have found, however, that older adults are equally if not more interested in the activ...

Elementary-age children (ages 3-13) are among the largest user groups of computers and the Internet, so it is important to design searching and browsing tools to support them. However, many such tools do not consider their skills and preferences. In this paper, we present the design rationale and process for creating the searching and browsing tool...

This paper describes research that investigates the use of a technology designed to support young children's collaborative artifact creation in outdoor environments. Collaboration while creating knowledge artifacts is an important part of children's learning, yet it can be limited while exploring outdoors. The construction of a joint representation...

Working with children as our design partners, our intergenerational design team at the University of Maryland has been developing both new design methodologies and new storytelling technology for children. In this chapter, we focus on two results of our efforts: PETS, a robotic storyteller, and Storykit, a construction kit of low-tech and high-tech...

This panel brings together experts in usability engineering who draw on their research and experiences to present practical advice about what to avoid when performing usability tests and how to take advantage of opportunities afforded by usability testing.