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Designing for spatial competence

Published: 03 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Child-computer interaction designers are increasingly concerned with developing technologies that support and encourage physical activity in children in everyday indoor and outdoor settings. This trend mirrors commercial developments towards so-called exertion interfaces like the Nintendo®Wii™ that require full-body engagement. Physical health benefits aside, these types of interfaces present an important and underexplored design opportunity because they also engage children's spatial cognitive abilities. Can we harness this potential and design interfaces that support the development of spatial competence in children? To explore this question, the paper describes some of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of spatial competence as they relate to interaction design for children. With this background, I explore five interaction design examples: taking multiple perspectives on the environment, zooming in and out, estimating distances, experiencing motion, and encountering rich visual cues. These examples provide a starting point for new directions in designing exertion interfaces and ubiquitous computing interfaces for children that support different aspects of spatial cognitive development.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IDC '09: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
June 2009
347 pages
ISBN:9781605583952
DOI:10.1145/1551788
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]

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Published: 03 June 2009

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  1. design theory
  2. exertion interfaces
  3. physical play
  4. spatial cognitive development

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View all
  • (2020)Engaging Children to Co-create Outdoor Play Activities for Place-makingProceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 110.1145/3385010.3385017(44-54)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
  • (2018)The Things We Play with Roles of Technology in Social PlayProceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3242671.3242695(451-462)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Gamified educational programme for childhood obesity2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON.2018.8363476(1962-1668)Online publication date: Apr-2018
  • (2016)Learning healthy lifestyles through active videogames, motor games and the gamification of educational activitiesComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.05255:PA(529-551)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2016
  • (2011)Self-Assessments in Contemporary Adult E-LearningEncyclopedia of Information Communication Technologies and Adult Education Integration10.4018/978-1-61692-906-0.ch033(557-577)Online publication date: 2011

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