Evaluation of preschool children's fantasy play in the tabletop environment

Abstract

This paper presents the experience and findings of a user study investigating preschool children's fantasy play. Ten same-sex dyads of children (aged 3 and 4) were observed playing with the physical farm toys and the virtual farm set implementation on a Mitsubishi DT multi-touch interactive tabletop. Both qualitative and quantitative data were performed for data collection. Findings showed that high evidence of fantasy play bouts performed by the participants during the physical and the virtual Session 2. This paper also reports the similarities and differences between physical and virtual play environments.

Supporting social pretend play with a virtual toy

“…Unfortunately, Tigrito does not support social interaction as children can only interact with a robot, thus there is no communications with living humans. Additionally, there is an interactive game known as The Farm [13] which operates on interactive tabletops. The Farm was developed to investigate children's imaginative play with virtual stimuli [13] and it allows children to create imaginative stories by dragging available objects around the screen and the selected objects then display their response.…”

“…Additionally, there is an interactive game known as The Farm [13] which operates on interactive tabletops. The Farm was developed to investigate children's imaginative play with virtual stimuli [13] and it allows children to create imaginative stories by dragging available objects around the screen and the selected objects then display their response. Besides, interacting with The Farm also allows the children to have social bonding as they may play together with their friends.…”

Play-based design

“…In the role of "testers", we considered publications featuring research that conducted a planned user study with predefined tasks for children to perform during their interactions with technology with the goal of improving the technology (Mansor 2012). The researchers usually did not have any expectations of getting design ideas from the children, except assessing particular features or usability issues with their prototypes .…”

“…Moreover, children's drawings did not tend to provide useful information from which designers could elicit ideas. Mansor (2012) reported an experience of a user study conducted with ten children aged three and four years-old, published at OzChi. The researcher initially developed the design concept of his prototype by observing three to five-year-old children in their school environment.…”

“…The researcher initially developed the design concept of his prototype by observing three to five-year-old children in their school environment. After this initial session, the author conducted an informal discussion and play session using a paper prototype, to gather design ideas with the children (Mansor 2012). In this study children were involved in the role of informants at the beginning of the process offering design ideas to improve the paper prototype, and they later participated in the role of testers in a series of pilot studies that preceded an evaluation of a tabletop technology.…”