In this paper, we explore how children engage with search engine result pages (SERP) generated by a popular search API in response to their online inquiries. We do so to further understand children navigation behaviour. To accomplish this goal, we examine search logs produced as a result of children (ages 6 to 12), using metrics commonly used to operationalize engagement, including: position of clicks, time spent hovering, and the sequence of navigation on a SERP. We also investigate the potential connection between the text complexity of SERP snippets and engagement. Our findings verify that children engage more frequently with SERP results in higher ranking positions, but that engagement does not decrease linearly as children navigate to lower ranking positions. They also reveal that children generally spend more time hovering on snippets with more complex readability levels (i.e., harder to read) than snippets on the lower end of the readability spectrum.
more »
« less
Engage!: Co-designing Search Engine Result Pages to Foster Interactions
In this paper, we take a step towards understanding how to design search engine results pages (SERP) that encourage children’s engagement as they seek for online resources. For this, we conducted a participatory design session to enable us to elicit children’s preferences and determine what children (ages 6–12) find lacking in more traditional SERP. We learned that children want more dynamic means of navigating results and additional ways to interact with results via icons. We use these findings to inform the design of a new SERP interface, which we denoted CHIRP. To gauge the type of engagement that a SERP incorporating interactive elements–CHIRP–can foster among children, we conducted a user study at a public school. Analysis of children’s interactions with CHIRP, in addition to responses to a post-task survey, reveals that adding additional interaction points results in a SERP interface that children prefer, but one that does not necessarily change engagement levels through clicks or time spent on SERP.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1763649
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10337067
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Interaction Design and Children
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 583-587
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This work describes the design of real-time dance-based interaction with a humanoid robot, where the robot seeks to promote physical activity in children by taking on multiple roles as a dance partner. It acts as a leader by initiating dances but can also act as a follower by mimicking a child’s dance movements. Dances in the leader role are produced by a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on children’s music videos taken from YouTube. On the other hand, a music orchestration platform is implemented to generate background music in the follower mode as the robot mimics the child’s poses. In doing so, we also incorporated the largely unexplored paradigm of learning-by-teaching by including multiple robot roles that allow the child to both learn from and teach to the robot. Our work is among the first to implement a largely autonomous, real-time full-body dance interaction with a bipedal humanoid robot that also explores the impact of the robot roles on child engagement. Importantly, we also incorporated in our design formal constructs taken from autism therapy, such as the least-to-most prompting hierarchy, reinforcements for positive behaviors, and a time delay to make behavioral observations. We implemented a multimodal child engagement model that encompasses both affective engagement (displayed through eye gaze focus and facial expressions) as well as task engagement (determined by the level of physical activity) to determine child engagement states. We then conducted a virtual exploratory user study to evaluate the impact of mixed robot roles on user engagement and found no statistically significant difference in the children’s engagement in single-role and multiple-role interactions. While the children were observed to respond positively to both robot behaviors, they preferred the music-driven leader role over the movement-driven follower role, a result that can partly be attributed to the virtual nature of the study. Our findings support the utility of such a platform in practicing physical activity but indicate that further research is necessary to fully explore the impact of each robot role.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Childhood ambulatory disabilities detract from not only the physical development, but also the social engagement of young children. Commercial mobility aids can help improve the autonomy of children with disabilities, but affordability issues, policy challenges, and uncertainty about training standards limit early use of these devices. In this paper, we build on affordable research-grade mobility aids for young children and consider how to design and evaluate an assistive robot that can support the use of these devices. With young children’s contingency learning abilities in mind, we designed an assistive mobile robot capable of supplying age-appropriate light, sound, and bubble rewards. We conducted a first evaluation of the robot’s ability to support driving practice with N = 5 typically developing infants. The results indicate mixed success of the robot rewards; driving distances uniformly tended to fall over the course of the study, but children did tend to look at the robot. In a second exploratory study involving N = 6 children in free ambulatory play, we see clearer differences in gaze and behavior from the introduction of an assistive robot. Generally, this research can inform others interested in assistive robotic interventions for young children.more » « less
-
We aim to design robotic educational support systems that can promote socially and intellectually meaningful learning experiences for students while they complete school work outside of class. To pursue this goal, we conducted participatory design studies with 10 children (aged 10–12) to explore their design needs for robot assisted homework. We investigated children’s current ways of doing homework, the type of support they receive while doing homework, and co-designed the speech and expressiveness of a homework companion robot. Children and parents attending our design sessions explained that an emotionally expressive social robot as a homework aid can support students’ motivation and engagement, as well as their affective state. Children primarily perceived the robot as a dedicated assistant at home, capable of forming meaningful friendships, or a shared classroom learning resource. We present key design recommendations to support students’ homework experiences with a learning companion robot.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Effective storytelling relies on engagement and interaction. This work develops an automated software platform for telling stories to children and investigates the impact of two design choices on children’s engagement and willingness to interact with the system: story distribution and the use of complex gesture. A storyteller condition compares stories told in a third person, narrator voice with those distributed between a narrator and first-person story characters. Basic gestures are used in all our storytellings, but, in a second factor, some are augmented with gestures that indicate conversational turn changes, references to other characters and prompt children to ask questions. An analysis of eye gaze indicates that children attend more to the story when a distributed storytelling model is used. Gesture prompts appear to encourage children to ask questions, something that children did, but at a relatively low rate. Interestingly, the children most frequently asked “why” questions. Gaze switching happened more quickly when the story characters began to speak than for narrator turns. These results have implications for future agent-based storytelling system research.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3459990.3465183
