Towards guidelines for designing augmented toy environments

Abstract

Combining interactive technology with traditional toys promises to significantly enhance the educational value of children's play. Designing such augmented toy environments, however, requires designers to take both the traditional, technology-less nature of the toy, and the novel interactive aspects of the newly accessible virtual environment into account. This article attempts to present a unified set of guidelines for the design and implementation of augmented toy environments, drawing upon existing literature in traditional and educational toy and game design, as well as our own experiences in building mixed reality game environments. We also offer practical advice on the use of these guidelines by reporting on our own augmented toy environment for young children, called the Augmented Knight's Castle, which encourages learning about the Middle Ages in a playful way.

Evaluating the Impact of Design Affordances in Preschool Children's Toy Preferences

“…Mertala et al (2016) discovered that 6-8-year-old children's toy-preferences are based on four overlapping toy values which are functional play, material, social and personal. In (Hinske et al, 2008) various guidelines on how to design augmented toy environments are shown. The Universal Design of Play Tool (Ruffino et al, 2006) is a rating instrument that assesses whether a toy has universal design aspects that meet different abilities of children from the age of 0 to 3 years, with and without disabilities.…”

rfid in pervasive computing: State-of-the-art and outlook

“…rfid-based tangible interfaces have also been explored in [55], where tags were used to augment toys employed in educational games. The emphasis of this work is on the ability of tangibles-unlike traditional computer games-to be shared between several children, a capability which allows for simultaneous and co-located interactions and furthermore it does not hinder social interaction between members of the play-group.…”

An infrastructure for interactive and playful learning in augmented toy environments

“…The AKC in its basic version (without mediators) definitely complies with these requirements (see also [2]). Even the mediators, the magic mirror and the PDA-based loupe, respectively, are designed and integrated to not distract children from their original playing but they rather serve as information terminals that can be consulted when desired, thus contributing to the idea of offering the information whenever and wherever needed without disrupting the natural environment of the user.…”

“…To achieve this, however, an infrastructure must be provided that takes into account the very dynamic nature of such play environments, without compromising the traditional play experience, i.e., the technology required to integrate the educational content should merely be an add-on and not become the sole focus of the play environment [2].…”