skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: StoryCarnival: Inspiring Play with Stories and an Enhanced Puppet
As developmental barriers to children’s access to technology have lowered, dark patterns in apps geared toward children encourage privacy invasions and compulsive use of technology. With StoryCarnival, we use a web app with e-book and printable stories and an adult-operated voice agent to encourage the opposite: mindful and minimal use of technology to support developmentally significant aspects of children’s play.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1908476 2040204
PAR ID:
10595901
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Springer Nature Switzerland
Date Published:
Page Range / eLocation ID:
305 to 309
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth ’20))
    null (Ed.)
    Getting the right amount of high quality sleep is crucial for overall health and wellbeing, and pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies have shown promise for allowing individuals to track and manage their sleep quality. However, sleep technology research has traditionally focused on individual-level solutions. In this paper, we elucidate social requirements for family sleep technologies. We take a family informatics approach to sleep, through an in-home interview study with 10 families with young children. We describe families’ current practices, values, and perceived role for technology, showing that sleep technology has many opportunities beyond individual-level tracking. We also provide design dimensions and implications for family-based sleep technologies, especially the potential for technologies that support family activities and rituals, encourage children’s independence, and provide comfort. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Interaction Design and Children)
    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
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Behaviour & Information Technology)
    In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children’s socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children’s face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children’s sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children’s socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival’s support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival’s components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context. 
    more » « less
  4. (, 2019 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting)
    null (Ed.)
    Use of geospatial technology in higher education facilitates student engagement, promotes deeper understanding of material, and supports inquiry-based learning. However, technology must be applied strategically to generate optimal results. While use of web-based interactive modules and short video are constructive in curriculum, it is beneficial to combine this with exposure to hands-on, experimental, field-based technologies. Experiential learning with technology in the physical environment allows students to understand both the challenges and achievements of scientific investigation. This creates a more comprehensive understanding of science as an iterative process of experimentation and investigation and enrichens course material. This paper explores the uniquely advantageous opportunity Geography educators have to combine classroom-based technology with field-based educational experiences. Classroom use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remotely Sensed data is increasingly accessible with abundant free educational resources. In addition, field-based use of technology can promote location awareness and spatial critical thinking with the use of GPS-based activities. GPS-based educational units also highlight the growing field of citizen science and can be designed as service-based learning opportunities. Use of highly affordable micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) demonstrates data collection procedures. In addition, exposure to Surveying techniques and the field of Geomatics highlights real-world applications of geographic technology. We discuss the use of geospatial technologies in introductory and advanced higher education courses and examine how technology can encourage access to scientific inquiry throughout the student population. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; (, Interactive Storytelling (Lecture Notes in Computer Science))
    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
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email