Michail N. Giannakos and Letizia JaccheriNorwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)Department of Computer and Information Science{michail.giannakos, letizia}@idi.ntnu.no

Code your own Game: the Case of Children with HearingImpairments

ICEC 2014

Context• Code your own Game

– felicitous, creative and collaborative environments to facilitate learning, with particular focus on programming. Todays technologies not only allow a more active, physical engagement, but also provide the opportunity for novel and collaborative interactions.

• Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children

Code your own game• Researchers and artists design

and implement two workshop programs - Reggio Emilia philosophy of creative reuse and the open-source software Scratch

• Empirical evaluation of a total of 66 pupils

• The results show that – software and hardware intensive

activities raise awareness of technology

– intensify the experience– invite students to explore

boundaries and increase collaboration and the exchange of views and ideas.

The Physical Phase

• Children’s worked at ReMida centers according to Reggio Emilia education principles. The main idea is that the initiative for creative actions should spring from the child himself/herself. ReMida centers are creative places with a lot of appealing objects where students start to work without being activated by adults.

The Interactive artifacts• Children’s worked in teams

(dyads or pentads) and completed and, published in total six interactive works and eleven installations (see example, figures) based on the software/hardware and the recycling materials of the center. Record of the children’s activities was kept through photographs, surveys, interviews and observation reports.

Connecting the Physical with the Digital through Programming

Children engaged in programming languages (i.e., Scratch) and programmable hardware platforms (i.e., Arduino), which enable them to engage in the world of creativity with digital enriched artifacts, like robots and interactive installations

Participants

• Norwegian Deaf Museum Curator

• Norwegian Deaf Museum Director of Education

• Trondheim Deaf School teacher

• Trondheim Deaf School teacher

• Artist Programmer• HCI researcher

Data Collection• Survey

– the six experts were asked to rate, on a 7-point scale survey

• The child seemed to enjoy programming during the workshop (Enj1)

• The child seemed interested in actively exploring programming in the workshop (Enj2)

• The child seemed entertained by the workshop in general (Enj3)

• The child was able to follow the tasks of the workshop (Cont1)

• The child has the skills and the ability to follow the tasks of the workshop (Cont2)

• The workshop was easy for the child (Easy1)• The workshop was flexible for the child (Easy2)• The concept of the workshop was clear and

understandable from the child (Easy3)

• Fokus group – with experts; and

afterwards, by employing content analysis, a revised set of guidelines was obtained

– 1. approach; 2) settings; 3) means

Approach

• Follow children learning– Instructor should wait the interpreter to

finish, give enough time to children to read information and repeat when children do not follow the instructions (as many times as needed).

• Use personal approach

– The instructor should treat every child uniquely, and consider his/her individual difficulties. The instructor should keep eye contact with all the children to ensure that they are following him.

• Provide practical information

– Reduce the amount of the provided information, by focusing to the practical information. Support the recall of communication patterns rather than building new ones and provide few but distinct choices to the child.

Settings

• Different sessions with clear goals

– The activity should be well-structured with different and clear (IT-programming) competencies on each session and many breaks between the sessions.

• Very well prepared interpreters

– Interpreters and instructors need to work together in advance, in order to reduce potential difficulties in communication and the vocabulary (sign language vocabulary is limited). Interpreters need to have some knowledge in the field (e.g., programming).

Means

• Many, clear and big visual aids– Big screens, projectors and other visual

aids are essential on assisting children communication. Text should have clear large headings, and different notions should be distinguished with different colors and shapes.

• Support children-computer interaction via visual tools

– Children-computer (program) interaction should be supported with various visual means. For instance children-program interaction through the web-camera motivates them to optimize their code.

Limitations

• absence of children’s voices in this work

References

• Giannakos, Michail N., and Letizia Jaccheri. "An Enriched Artifacts Activity for Supporting Creative Learning: Perspectives for Children with Impairments."Entertainment Computing–ICEC 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. 160-163.

• Giannakos, Michail N., and Letizia Jaccheri. "Designing creative activities for children: the importance of collaboration and the threat of losing control."Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. ACM, 2013.

• Giannakos, Michail N., and Letizia Jaccheri. "What motivates children to become creators of digital enriched artifacts?." Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition. ACM, 2013.

Conclusions

• Thanks to Audun Eriksen, Pål Bøyesen, Kai Torgeir Dragland (pictures)