Prova tipográficaResearch has identified a need for design of interactive products for children, as well as long-term studies that investigate the effects of its use in the classroom environment. Following the design and development of a digital manipulative system for storytelling, which involved preschool children and teachers, the investigation presented here reports findings from a four-month evaluation of the system that was carried in a Portuguese preschool involving 24 pairs of children. During the four months the researchers were able to observe children’s interaction with the digital manipulative system that was not biased by the novelty of the system or by time constrains. The gathered data showed that children used the digital manipulative system to create stories and play language games, which are activities that foster the development of oral language and emergent literacy, and are formally targeted in the preschool curriculum. The system provided challenge and adventure, motivating children to collaboratively explore and create narratives, empowering each child to actively participate in the task.CIEC – Research Centre on Child Studies, IE, UMinho (FCT R&D unit 317), Portuga

In this paper, we present results of two user studies that compared the performance of touch-based and pen-based gesture input on capacitive touchscreens for both adult and 8-11 years old child users. Results showed that inputting gestures with pen was significantly faster and more accurate than touch for adult users. However, no significant effect of input method was observed on performance for child users. Similarly, user experience evaluation showed that a large number of adult users favoured one technique over the other and/or found a technique more comfortable to use than the other, while child users were mostly neutral. This trend, however, was not statistically significant.

This paper describes research on designing a tangible system for collaborative storytelling, which addresses preschool children. The first part of the work focused on creating a tangible interface, for children aged four to five years, proposing to create a playful experimental space where children can collaboratively engage in creating their own multimedia narratives. Further research proposes to carry a long term study with a group of 25 five preschoolers interacting with the developed tangible system, trying to investigate how physical interaction and collaboration might influence and shape cognitive and social processes in real classroom settings. We describe the design process, as well as the final system, and report findings from a first preliminary study.