Investigating Separation of Territories and Activity Roles in Children's Collaboration around Tabletops

Abstract

Prior work has shown that children exhibit negative collaborative behaviors, such as blocking others' access to objects, when collaborating on interactive tabletop computers. We implemented previous design recommendations, namely separate physical territories and activity roles, which had been recommended to decrease these negative collaborative behaviors. We developed a multi-touch "I-Spy" picture searching application with separate territory partitions and activity roles. We conducted a deep qualitative analysis of how six pairs of children, ages 6 to 10, interacted with the application. Our analysis revealed that the collaboration styles differed for each pair, both in regards to the interaction with the task and with each other. Several pairs exhibited negative physical and verbal collaborative behaviors, such as nudging each other out of the way. Based on our analysis, we suggest that it is important for a collaborative task to offer equal opportunities for interaction, but it may not be necessary to strive for complete equity of collaboration. We examine the applicability of prior design guidelines and suggest open questions for future research to inform the design of tabletop applications to support collaboration for children.

Designing a Learning Robot to Encourage Collaboration Between Children

“…Communication is described as an integral element of collaboration [11] and an interpersonal skill that will develop when children are provided with the opportunities for social interaction [6]. Rather than explicitly assigning roles to the children as in [27], we left it up to the children whether they established a role division or not, and in what way, thus allowing them to adopt their own collaboration style. Supporting diversity in group dynamics has been argued to be beneficial to collaborative learning [17].…”

“…Unlike earlier studies of collaboration between children [19,27], which were purely qualitative in nature, we attempted to carry out a quantitative analysis based on observations. The validity of the scoring system we used still requires further investigation.…”

“…A more extreme approach to collaboration was taken in the Story Table system, which forced children to work together by requiring multiple-user touch actions (performed by children simultaneously) for certain crucial operations [28]. In a non-storytelling context, Woodward et al tried to encourage collaboration through role division in a digital tabletop game for children [27].…”

“…Firstly, an important change to the setup was made by fixing the tablet to the table. This would make observing the robot and giving feedback at the same time more difficult, so we expected this to stimulate collaboration in the form of a role division [27].…”