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. How to give both children and older adults a voice in a shared design process comes with many challenges. This paper details an exploratory study focusing on connecting generations through co-design methods that can enable idea construction and elaboration to flourish. Design techniques were adapted that ranged from low-tech prototyping, to sticky-note feedback, to distributed collaboration. The critical finding in this research was how children and older adults need time together to collaborate, but also time apart to collaborate at a distance. This case study research reports on how our methods evolved and how others can apply these methods for their own work.

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

This article examines children's responses to self-selected books in a digital library and begins to identify patterns in those responses. As part of a larger longitudinal study, the study presented here is an analysis of 241 book response forms submitted by 12 children from 4 countries: Germany, Honduras, New Zealand, and the United States. The children described most of the books they read as being funny or happy and generally rated them with four or fi ve stars (out of fi ve stars). The most commonly identifi ed types of responses were those expressing like or dislike, summarizing the text, or explaining how the book made the child feel. Two factors were identifi ed that infl uenced response patterns from the study sites: the data collection instrument and adult mediation. This research has implications for library program development related to recreational reading and for changes in the procedures for data collection in this area of research.

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