Child-centered interaction in the design of a game for social skills intervention

Abstract

In this article we describe the CALSIUM framework to elicit children's contributions and perspectives in the design of an online game for enhancing social skills of children. This study advocates a participatory design approach that emphasizes the active involvement of users at the early part of the design process. The children play-tested the game prototype and participated in focus group discussions. Using storyboarding, a low-fidelity prototyping technique, they developed design concepts and ideas which were translated into design directions for the development of the game. The data collected were used to glean insights into the likes and dislikes of children and to analyze the opportunities and challenges in engaging children as users, testers, informants, and design partners. Besides stretching children's creativity and critical thinking on the game design, the children's cognitive understanding of social knowledge was enhanced, evident from the design artifacts produced.

User-centered research in the early stages of a learning game

“…Users were only involved at the end of the development cycle for the purpose of evaluation. At first glance, the danger of this mode of game design is that it risks imposing adults' conceptualizations of a social phenomenon onto children's experiences, which are likely to vary quite considerably from one another [29]. However, including children, and more generally users of the game, early on in the design process can yield more than just realistic conceptualizations and narratives.…”

“…Teachers' perspectives have provided designers with clearer definitions of the problem they are addressing, whereas children have stretched designers' imagination with provocative and novel design suggestions [19] [27] [25] [29]. However, the benefits of including users in the design process were not met without challenges.…”

“…However, the benefits of including users in the design process were not met without challenges. Tan et al asked children to create narratives of peer-to-peer interactions and to design their own emotional interventions [29]. They found that boys tended to sketch out violent quests previously encountered in entertainment games while many children were unable to provide input to support the deeper learning goals that designers were probing.…”

An Experiential Approach to the Design and Evaluation of a Gamified Research Tool for Law in Children's Lives

“…PD is increasingly employed for designing technology for children [26,27,28,29]. Based on the assumption that children can contribute their own ideas to creative design [26], they are involved as informants, testers, end-users and cooperative inquirer throughout the entire design process [28].…”

“…PD is increasingly employed for designing technology for children [26,27,28,29]. Based on the assumption that children can contribute their own ideas to creative design [26], they are involved as informants, testers, end-users and cooperative inquirer throughout the entire design process [28]. Children are enabled to develop a narrative version of a game before it is implemented digitally [27] and to evaluate and redesign game prototypes iteratively with the game design and development team [29].…”