skip to main content
10.1145/2396636.2396671acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesissConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Interaction and recognition challenges in interpreting children's touch and gesture input on mobile devices

Published: 11 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

As mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone become increasingly commonplace, touchscreen interactions are quickly overtaking other interaction methods in terms of frequency and experience for many users. However, most of these devices have been designed for the general, typical user. Trends indicate that children are using these devices (either their parents' or their own) for entertainment or learning activities. Previous work has found key differences in how children use touch and surface gesture interaction modalities vs. adults. In this paper, we specifically examine the impact of these differences in terms of automatically and reliably understanding what kids meant to do. We present a study of children and adults performing touch and surface gesture interaction tasks on mobile devices. We identify challenges related to (a) intentional and unintentional touches outside of onscreen targets and (b) recognition of drawn gestures, that both indicate a need to design tailored interaction for children to accommodate and overcome these challenges.

References

[1]
Anthony, L. and Wobbrock, J.O. A lightweight multistroke recognizer for user interface prototypes. Proc. GI 2010, Canadian Information Processing Society (2010), 245--252.
[2]
Anthony, L. and Wobbrock, J.O. $N-protractor: a fast and accurate multistroke recognizer. Proc. GI 2012, (2012), 117--120.
[3]
Beery, K., Buktenica, N., and Beery, N.A. The Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, 5th Edition. Modern Curriculum Press, New Jersey, 2004.
[4]
Brown, Q. and Anthony, L. Toward comparing the touchscreen interaction patterns of kids and adults. ACM SIGCHI EIST Workshop, 4pp.
[5]
Brown, Q., Bonsignore, E., Hatley, L., Druin, A., Walsh, G., Foss, E., Brewer, R., Hammer, J., and Golub, E. Clear Panels: a technique to design mobile application interactivity. Proc. DIS 2010, ACM (2010), 360--363.
[6]
Chiong, C. and Shuler, C. Learning: Is there an app for that? Investigations of young children's usage and learning with mobile devices and apps. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, New York, NY, 2010.
[7]
Donker, A. and Reitsma, P. Aiming and clicking in young children's use of the computer mouse. Computers in Human Behavior 23, 6 (2007), 2863--2874.
[8]
Guyon, I., Schomaker, L., Plamondon, R., Liberman, M., and Janet, S. UNIPEN project of on-line data exchange and recognizer benchmarks. Proc. ICPR 1994, IEEE (1994), 29--33.
[9]
Hammond, T.A., Logsdon, D., Paulson, B., Johnston, J., Peschel, J., Wolin, A., and Taele, P. A sketch recognition system for recognizing free-hand course of action diagrams. Proc. IAAI 2010, AAAI Press (2010), 1781--1786.
[10]
Harris, A., Rick, J., Bonnett, V., Yuill, N., Fleck, R., Marshall, P., and Rogers, Y. Around the table: Are multiple-touch surfaces better than single-touch for children's collaborative interactions? Proc. CSCL 2009, International Society of the Learning Sciences (2009), 335--344.
[11]
Hinrichs, U. and Carpendale, S. Gestures in the wild. Proc. CHI 2011, ACM (2011), 3023--3032.
[12]
Hourcade, J.P., Bederson, B.B., Druin, A., and Guimbretière, F. Differences in pointing task performance between preschool children and adults using mice. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 11, 4 (2004), 357--386.
[13]
Hse, H.H. and Newton, A.R. Recognition and beautification of multi-stroke symbols in digital ink. Computers & Graphics 29, 4 (2005), 533--546.
[14]
Inkpen, K.M. Drag-and-drop versus point-and-click mouse interaction styles for children. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 8, 1 (2001), 1--33.
[15]
Joiner, R., Messer, D., Light, P., and Littleton, K. It is best to point for young children: a comparison of children's pointing and dragging. Computers in Human Behavior 14, 3 (1998), 513--529.
[16]
Jones, T. An empirical study of children's use of computer pointing devices. Journal of Educational Computing Research 7, 1 (1991), 61--76.
[17]
Keates, S. and Trewin, S. Effect of age and Parkinson's disease on cursor positioning using a mouse. Proc. ASSETS 2005, ACM (2005), 68--75.
[18]
Li, Y. Gesture search: a tool for fast mobile data access. Proc. UIST 2010, ACM (2010), 87--96.
[19]
MacKenzie, I.S., Kauppinen, T., and Silfverberg, M. Accuracy measures for evaluating computer pointing devices. Proc. CHI 2001, ACM Press (2001), 9--16.
[20]
Norris, C. and Soloway, E. Envisioning the handheld-centric classroom. Journal of Educational Computing Research 30, 4 (2004), 281--294.
[21]
Pitrelli, J.F. and Perrone, M.P. Confidence-scoring post-processing for off-line handwritten-character recognition verification. Proc. ICDAR 2003, IEEE (2003), 278--282.
[22]
Read, J.C., MacFarlane, S., and Casey, C. Pens behaving badly-usability of pens and graphics tablets for text entry with children. Adj. Proc. UIST 2002, ACM Press (2002), 21--
[23]
Rick, J., Harris, A., Marshall, P., Fleck, R., Yuill, N., and Rogers, Y. Children designing together on a multi-touch tabletop: An analysis of spatial orientation and user interactions. Proc. IDC 2009, ACM (2009), 106--114.
[24]
Rubine, D. Specifying gestures by example. SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 25, 4 (1991), 329--337.
[25]
Ryall, K., Morris, M.R., Everitt, K., Forlines, C., and Shen, C. Experiences with and observations of direct-touch tabletops. Proc. Tabletop 2006, IEEE (2006), 8pp.
[26]
Shin, N., Norris, C., and Soloway, E. Effects of handheld games on students learning in mathematics. Proc. ICLS 2006, International Society of the Learning Sciences (2006), 702--708.
[27]
Shuler, C. Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, New York, NY, 2009.
[28]
Vatavu, R.-D., Vogel, D., Casiez, G., and Grisoni, L. Estimating the perceived difficulty of pen gestures. Proc. INTERACT 2011, Springer (2011), 89--106.
[29]
Vogel, D. and Balakrishnan, R. Direct pen interaction with a conventional graphical user interface. Human-Computer Interaction 25, 4 (2010), 324--388.
[30]
Willems, D., Niels, R., Van Gerven, M., and Vuurpijl, L. Iconic and multi-stroke gesture recognition. Pattern Recognition 42, 12 (2009), 3303--3312.
[31]
Wobbrock, J.O., Aung, H.H., Rothrock, B., and Myers, B.A. Maximizing the guessability of symbolic input. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2005, ACM (2005), 1869--1872.
[32]
Wobbrock, J.O., Wilson, A.D., and Li, Y. Gestures without libraries, toolkits or training: a $1 recognizer for user interface prototypes. Proc. UIST 2007, ACM (2007), 159--168.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Towards a Framework for Evaluating Synthetic Surface GesturesCompanion Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems10.1145/3660515.3661327(22-30)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2024)“Are you smart?”: Children's Understanding of “Smart” TechnologiesProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655787(625-638)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)The impacts of situational visual impairment on usability of touch screensMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-024-18689-9Online publication date: 9-Mar-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Interaction and recognition challenges in interpreting children's touch and gesture input on mobile devices

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces
    November 2012
    430 pages
    ISBN:9781450312097
    DOI:10.1145/2396636
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 11 November 2012

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. $n
    2. android
    3. child computer interaction
    4. gesture recognition
    5. mobile devices
    6. surface gesture interaction
    7. touch interaction
    8. touchscreens

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    ITS'12
    Sponsor:
    ITS'12: Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
    November 11 - 14, 2012
    Massachusetts, Cambridge, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    ITS '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 63 submissions, 38%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 119 of 418 submissions, 28%

    Upcoming Conference

    ISS '24
    Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces
    October 27 - 30, 2024
    Vancouver , BC , Canada

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)53
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
    Reflects downloads up to 22 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Towards a Framework for Evaluating Synthetic Surface GesturesCompanion Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems10.1145/3660515.3661327(22-30)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
    • (2024)“Are you smart?”: Children's Understanding of “Smart” TechnologiesProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655787(625-638)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
    • (2024)The impacts of situational visual impairment on usability of touch screensMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-024-18689-9Online publication date: 9-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Tablets and Apps for Promoting Nanoliteracy in Early Childhood Education: Results from an Experimental StudyJournal of Science Education and Technology10.1007/s10956-024-10132-wOnline publication date: 9-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Learning heuristically-selected and neurally-guided feature for age group recognition using unconstrained smartphone interactionProceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.24963/ijcai.2023/338(3029-3037)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
    • (2023)Age-Based Differences in Drone Control Gestures: An Exploratory StudyProceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference10.1145/3638380.3638401(49-58)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2023
    • (2023)MOVES: Going beyond hardwired multisensory environments for childrenProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3594493(716-720)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Interaction Modalities and Children’s Learning in Multisensory Environments: Challenges and Trade-offsProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589385(397-410)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Designing Textual Information in AR Headsets to Aid in Adults’ and Children's Task PerformanceProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589373(27-39)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Not What I was Trained for – Out-of-Distribution-Tests for Interactive AIsEngineering Interactive Computer Systems. EICS 2023 International Workshops and Doctoral Consortium10.1007/978-3-031-59235-5_12(127-147)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media