I've gotten quite used to the weekly blog post routine at this point and I'm definitely a big fan of this week's post being open-ended. It has been a busier, more eventful (and very interesting) reading week than I thought I would and thought I would share a little bit of what I've been working on.
I am a Research Assistant in Semaphore Lab and one of the projects I'm assisting with involves understanding how children interact with educational content on tablets (via 'edutainment' game apps mostly). We decided to get a good chunk of our data collection done this week and so I was out at an elementary school 'hanging out' with second graders all day.
We were eye-tracking the kids (using one of these - http://www.seeingmachines.com/product/facelab/) as they played some educational games on an iPad and a LeapPad (a children's gaming tablet manufactured by Leapfrog Enterprises). What's amazing is how intuitively kids take to touch screens, even those without a whole lot of prior experience with tablets and smartphones. Anyway the goal of the study was to ascertain what aspects of the games (especially math-centric ones) kids actually pay more attention to.Was it the fun, colorful 'fluff' around the true educational content or the actual information intended to be passed on?
We were not going to evaluate kids on the concepts learnt during the games but to empirically (to as great an extent as possible) study/measure their interaction with games of this nature on tablets; an effort that would lead to to number of follow-up studies. We were also fully cognizant of the fact that attending to the 'non-informative' content more than the 'informative' content does not imply the lack of effective learning by any means; presumably the excess stuff helps the child stay engaged and play the game for longer, resulting in equivalent/more overall learning than focusing on the core content primarily.
Turns out, there has actually been very little work of this kind done before. Leapfrog and Apple don't really do any formal user testing with kids and so we were among the few people in the world to eye-track children playing on a tablet. And I think I know why that is...it sure isn't easy. Trying to keep kids still while the eye-tracker cameras calibrated and then making sure that their faces (eyes) were within the frame of the camera views while they were shuffling in their seats and leaning forward to touch, tap and swipe, was definitely immensely challenging. But also a whole lot of fun. It was a chance to do some real fieldwork and hopefully all that data turned out ok. We'll soon find out.
I am a Research Assistant in Semaphore Lab and one of the projects I'm assisting with involves understanding how children interact with educational content on tablets (via 'edutainment' game apps mostly). We decided to get a good chunk of our data collection done this week and so I was out at an elementary school 'hanging out' with second graders all day.
We were eye-tracking the kids (using one of these - http://www.seeingmachines.com/product/facelab/) as they played some educational games on an iPad and a LeapPad (a children's gaming tablet manufactured by Leapfrog Enterprises). What's amazing is how intuitively kids take to touch screens, even those without a whole lot of prior experience with tablets and smartphones. Anyway the goal of the study was to ascertain what aspects of the games (especially math-centric ones) kids actually pay more attention to.Was it the fun, colorful 'fluff' around the true educational content or the actual information intended to be passed on?
We were not going to evaluate kids on the concepts learnt during the games but to empirically (to as great an extent as possible) study/measure their interaction with games of this nature on tablets; an effort that would lead to to number of follow-up studies. We were also fully cognizant of the fact that attending to the 'non-informative' content more than the 'informative' content does not imply the lack of effective learning by any means; presumably the excess stuff helps the child stay engaged and play the game for longer, resulting in equivalent/more overall learning than focusing on the core content primarily.
Turns out, there has actually been very little work of this kind done before. Leapfrog and Apple don't really do any formal user testing with kids and so we were among the few people in the world to eye-track children playing on a tablet. And I think I know why that is...it sure isn't easy. Trying to keep kids still while the eye-tracker cameras calibrated and then making sure that their faces (eyes) were within the frame of the camera views while they were shuffling in their seats and leaning forward to touch, tap and swipe, was definitely immensely challenging. But also a whole lot of fun. It was a chance to do some real fieldwork and hopefully all that data turned out ok. We'll soon find out.
I knew about this project before the research had started and I was really interested in it, so it's really neat to get an update mid-experiment on what you're finding difficult and how the methodology is working out. I know how difficult it can be to make children do what you'd like them to do, especially when they think it's play time, so I can understand why the "human element" of the project is the most complicated one for you. At the same time, it sounds like a really important and interesting project, and it would be interesting to hear how you feel about it later in the research process.
ReplyDelete