How do we conceptualise and design mixed reality environments (MREs)? Here we describe a first pass at a conceptual framework and use it to inform the design of different kinds of activities for children to experiment with. Our aim was to investigate how different MRE set-ups affected children’s exploratory behaviour and their understanding of them. The familiar activity of colour mixing was used; different set-ups were provided, where paint or light colours could be mixed, by using either physical tools, digital tools or a combination of these. The findings of our study showed that novel mixes of physical and digital ‘transforms ’ engendered much exploration and reflection. 1.

How does designing for novel experiences with largely untried technologies get its inspiration? Here we report on a project whose goal was to promote learning through novel, playful visions of technologies. To this end, we experimented with a diversity of ambient and pervasive technologies to inspire and drive our design. Working as a large multi-disciplinary group of researchers and designers we developed novel and imaginative experiences for children. To crystallise our ideas we designed, implemented and experimented with a mixed reality adventure game, where children had to hunt an elusive, virtual creature called the Snark, in a large interactive environment. We describe our experiences, reflecting on the process of design inspiration in an area where so much remains unknown. Keywords Innovation, technology inspiration, novel user experiences, blue-sky research, physical/virtual integration, tangibles, conceptual development, wearables, middleware infrastructure, devices

The importance of play in young children’s lives cannot be minimized. From teddy bears to blocks, children’s experiences with the tools of play can impact their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Today, the tools of play include desktop computers and computerenhanced physical environments. In this paper, we consider the merits of desktop and physical environments for young children (4-6 years old), by comparing the same contentinfused game in both contexts. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used for data collection and analysis.

We reflect upon the process of developing a tangible space for children’s collaborative construction of screenbased systems. As in all design work, the design process involved continual refinements of initial ideas and their practical realisation. We discuss how some widely held qualities often put forward with tangible interfaces were given up in favour of reaching overall goals of interaction. In particular our design involved a shift from a focus on persistent representation and readability of tangible code structures, to instead focus on achieving reusability of programming resources. On a general level, our results illustrate a view on tangibles as resources for action instead of only as alternative forms of data representation. Importantly, this view includes action directed towards the computer as well as off-line socially oriented action conducted with the tangible artefacts. Author Keywords Tangible programming, TUI, embodied interaction

This paper presents a novel approach and interface for encouraging children to tell and act out original stories. "Dolltalk" is a toy that simulates speech recognition by capturing the gestures and speech of a child. The toy then plays back a child's pretend-play speech in altered voices representing the characters of the child's story. Dolltalk's tangible interface and ability to retell a child's story may enhance a child's creativity in narrative elaboration.

Sensor-based interactions are increasingly being used in the design of user experiences, ranging from the activation of controls to the delivery of ‘context–aware ’ information in the home. The benefits of doing so include the ability to deliver relevant information to people at appropriate times and to enable ‘hands-free’ control. A downside, however, is that sensor control often displaces user control, resulting in the user not knowing how to or being able to control aspects of a system. While this can be frustrating in many situations, it provides new opportunities for enhancing or augmenting various kinds of activities, where uncertainty can be exploited to good effect. We describe how we designed an adventure game for young children that incorporated a number of sensor-based interactions. We also present a preliminary conceptual framework intended to help designers and researchers develop novel user experiences using sensor-based interactions. A set of concepts are provided that characterize salient aspects of the user experience involved in sensing together with a discussion of the core properties of sensor technologies. 1.

Interactive narrative was, until a couple of years ago, more a topic of discussion in ACM Multimedia than in the CHI community. And where children were concerned, the issue was mostly how to make storybooks for children more interactive by adding sound, animation, etc. More recently, however, both narrative and interfaces for children have received significant attention. The two concerns join in the topic of how to create storytelling spaces to support children's own storytelling voice. Until now, nevertheless, there has been no comprehensive discussion at CHI of what it means to design for children to produce narrative in the context of technology. This panel, then, gathers researchers with a diverse set of perspectives to discuss what it means to support children as producers of tales. Keywords Storytelling, interfaces for children INTRODUCTION Technology is increasingly incorporated into artifacts for children. For the most part, however, such artifacts are programmed to talk to...

In this paper, the authors present Moving Pictures: Looking Out/Looking In, a robust, tangible, multi-user system that invites young users to create, explore, manipulate and share video content with others. Moving Pictures enables a meaningful, spontaneous and collaborative approach to video creation, selection and sequencing. The authors discuss their motivation in relationship to research in the domain of video editing. Their contribution in the domain of tangible interfaces for constructionist learning has been introduced with the implementation of participatory design sessions. They discuss workshop studies with 10-12 years old children from Sweden and Ireland playing with the Moving Pictures system.

“Fast and bulbous ”- In memory of Mike Scaife who was the inspiration and the instigator of the project Information Technology (IT) has become an ubiquitous part of education, with a wide range of software being developed and used nowadays to support children in their learning. A dominant model has been to provide information and learning material, that is accessed via the web through the use of desktop computers, in the classroom, the library or home. While the use of technology in this way is generally considered to be successful, it is limited in the kinds of learning activities that it supports. How else might we combine technology and information to extend learning? We report here on a very different approach, where we used a diversity of pervasive, hi-tech and mobile technologies to design a set of integrated, novel learning experiences, to take place outdoors in a wood. Our aim was to augment the physical environment with various forms of ambient digital information, such that children’s interactions and perceptions of it were extended in surprising and unusual ways. In so doing, our goal was to get children to take part and learn more about scientific enquiry, through discovering, reflecting and experimenting in an ambient wood. 1.

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