Swinxsbee: A Shared Interactive Play Object to Stimulate Children’s Social Play Behaviour and Physical Exercise

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes a study on the influence of personal and shared play objects on the amount of social interaction. The study makes use of Swinxs, a commercially available game console that uses the strength of digital games to facilitate physically active games that can be played indoor or outdoor. A Frisbee-like object called Swinxsbee has been designed to support new game possibilities for Swinxs and stimulate social interaction. The results of a user evaluation show that children playing with shared objects engage in more social interaction than children playing with personal objects. Furthermore we observed that when games require much physical activity, this might have a negative influence on the level of social interaction, while games demanding creativity might have a positive influence.

(Steering) Interactive Play Behavior

“…The Swinx is a commercial device that is also placed on the ground, where players interact with placing wearable RFID tags. Several researcher used the device to investigate aspects of play including physical activity, collaborative play, and changing game rules [23,104,251] 4 .…”

“…Poels et al also created an adapted version of the GEQ for kids, which has been applied in several studies in adapted form (reduced/extended) [21,22,104,192], and seems not to have been validated yet, which limits the extent it is used in (analyses of) the results [21] 2 .…”

“…Several observation schemes exist related to (interactive) play regarding social interaction and physical activity, such as the POS [222], the OPOS [17], MIPO focusing on social functioning [75], the Social Play Continuum 1 , OSMOS focusing on motor skills [50], and often such schemes are adapted and then applied for interactive play evaluation purposes [104,127,157,219,246]. One often used measure for inter-observer reliability is Cohen's κ.…”

“…Rosales et al debate whether this is true as they were more successful with an individual object, and also managed to trigger social interactions [218]. With their Swinxbee games Jansen and Bekker more convincingly showed by comparison that in their case shared objects in a collaborative setting did indeed stimulate forms of social interaction [104]. Nonetheless, one game with such an object that also triggered intense physical activity actually had a diminishing effect on social activity.…”

“…They concluded that stimulating creativity and mimicking could also have a positive effect on the amount of social interaction without the introduction of shared objects. Following their conclusions, it seems that interactive play could either focus on 1) a fast paced competitive game / stimulating physical activity, or 2) stimulating creativity and social interactions [4,104]. Such decisions and goals also influence other choices, such as the role assigned to an artificial referee [276].…”