A Pictorial Interaction Language for Children to Communicate with Cultural Virtual Characters

Abstract

In this paper, we outline the creation of an engaging and intuitive pictorial language as an interaction modality to be used by school children aged 9 to 11 years to interact with virtual characters in a cultural learning environment. Interaction takes place on a touch screen tablet computer linked to a desktop computer on which the characters are displayed. To investigate the benefit of such an interaction style, we conducted an evaluation study to compare the pictorial interaction language with a menu-driven version for the same system. Results indicate that children found the pictorial interaction language more fun and more exciting than the menus, with users expressing a desire to interact for longer using the pictorial interaction language. Thus, we think the pictorial interaction language can help support the children's experiential learning, allowing them to concentrate on the content of the cultural learning scenario.

Five Degrees of Happiness

“…To interact with MIXER, we were developing the Pictorial Interaction Language (PIL) an iPad application with the user dragging and dropping icons to create a dialogue with Tom [8,9]. At an early stage of PIL's development, we implemented two versions of MIXER for a comparative study between the PIL and a more traditional menu based approach.…”

Effectiveness and Fun Metrics in a Pervasive Game Experience: A Systematic Literature Review

“…After performing all the analysis of the data and the description of the process carried out, the effectiveness and fun metrics found in the accepted articles were shown, these metrics were classified in the categories of Social Game Metric, Measuring Player Population, Online Advertising [23,26] as well as all the papers that were found in the different databases, a number was assigned to each one (Table 5). Accepted: Document that meets the requirements of the exclusion/inclusion criteria c Rejected by title: Documents excluded because the title indicates another area of study d Rejected for Summary: Documents excluded because the summary indicated another area of study e Rejected by full text: documents excluded because the content indicated another area of study f Rejected: Documents that do not meet the exclusion/inclusion criteria requirements (sum of TR, AR, and FTR)…”

Engaging with virtual characters using a pictorial interaction language

“…The Pictorial Interaction Language (PIL) [1] was created to support and play a serious game, MIXER [2], developed in the eCUTE project. eCUTE aims to create and encourage technology enhanced learning experiences to promote cultural awareness.…”