Hello, welcome back. Today we'll be talking about designing for children, one of my favorite topics as you may have guessed from all the examples that I have used throughout this course. So this is really continuing the steam of universal design. So thinking about how you design is going to work for people of diverse abilities is time well spent. In many ways designing for children is the ultimate test of whether your system is easy to learn, intuitive and engaging. It also forces you to think about designing for limited literacy which could be very important. Now talking about children, it doesn't really make sense talk about all children as a group or everybody who's under 18 a single group of people. Difference ages of course mean different needs. On of the formative pieces of research in this field has been Jean Piaget's four critical stages of cognitive development. This is a theory where he discusses how children actually progress through all these cognitive stages and develop new skills as they grow. You also know, of course that motor skills differ among different ages and things like education, knowledge, practical skills, whether that's typing or being able to read. All of these develop with age as well. Now one important thing before I jump into specific ages. Is there is a lot of individual difference at each age. So, you may see a three year old who is reading the same way that a five year old would. Or you may see a ten year old who is in terms of their motor skills, behaving more like a six year old. It is quite possible. And all the skills don't progress evenly, so it's not a single individual is now functioning on all the parameters as if they're it. Some of their skills will be ahead, some their skills will be behind. And especially in terms of things like knowledge kids tend to develop islands of expertise. So for example, they may know everything that there is to know about Pokemon. At age four but not yet know how to read. So all these different aspects and skills develop differently. So, let's look at each of these ages in a bit more detail and we're going to use the Piaget's four critical stages as structure for this. So for kids younger than three, this is known as the sensorimotor stage. And by the way, all the photos are me. I didn't want to embarrass my brother by using photos of him. I asked, he said no, so all the photos are just going to be me. So this is me at age three and this is the sensorimotor stage. This is the stage where you're really learning by sensing the world. And if any of you have observed a toddler, you'll notice for example, that if something's in front of them, they want to touch it, they want to explore it, they probably want to put it in their mouth. The key skill that kind of signals a transition from the sensorimotor stage to the next stage is this idea of object permanence. This idea that you recognize that objects exist outside of your senses. So, if somebody shows you an apple and then they put it under the table and you can't see it anymore, that apple still exists. That idea of object permanence is kind of a key skill that children develop around the age of three. Now this is actually fairly controversial. Because some studies have shown that in fact, even babies have fairly good understanding of object permanence or at least object permanence if it's measured one way versus another. As you can imagine, it's really difficult to do studies with this group because you can't really ask a two year old child, so do you have object permanence yet? They won't be able to answer it verbally. So there's still a bit of controversy about this. The other thing that's really controversial at this stage is whether children should be using technology. The guidelines of American Pediatrics Association, have been that there should be no screen time younger than the age of three. And so these guidelines are being re-evaluated as we kind of recognize that all screen time is not equal. So possibly staring at a TV is very different from let's say Skyping with grandma. And cognitively these activities have different effect on the child. The key principle that you should keep in mind if you are designing technology for this group is not to replace social contact. Kids learn a lot from social contact especially words that they hear. Adults and other children around them use. So one of the interesting stories in this space was these set of videos called baby Einstein videos, that were touted as these will make your children smarter because they kind of have almost like a flashcard, kind of schoolish approach. But they found that in fact children who viewed a lot of those videos actually had less words, knew less words where it's in essence less smart than kids who just spent that time being with their parents and interacting socially. So if you are going to be designing technology, be really careful not to replace that social contact, those opportunities for the child to actually hear spoken word in person. So now let's progress to the 3 to 6 Years Old. This is me at 6, I think it was the first day of kindergarten. In Russia, the tradition was you bring flowers for the teacher, that's why I'm carrying a bouquet. So, this age is known as the preoperational stage. Now at this stage the children already realize that objects have permanence and words can be assigned to objects. They can usually speak by this age. But they still struggle with things like logic or perspective taking. The key skill that develops into this stage is something called theory of the mind, understanding that other people around you have different thoughts and opinions. So, very interesting study of that Piaget did with kids to kind of show this was by asking a child to be in a room. And the child was introduced to a doll and the doll has a basket. And the doll puts a ball or something in the basket and then the doll is taken out of the room. That researcher says okay, the doll left, we're going to play a trick on her. Moves the ball from the basket somewhere else, let's say into the cupboard. And then, they bring the doll back and the researcher asks the child. So where does the doll think her ball is? Now if you have theory of mind, you understand that the doll is out of the room while the ball was moved. The doll doesn't know were the ball went. The doll would still think it's in the basket. But, children assume that the doll has all of the same knowledge as they do. And so they frequently, before they reach the next stage and in this Preoperational stage, they assume that the ball is actually going to be recovered. So this can be really interesting for things like video chat for example, where you often times have to make assertions about what the other person is seeing. For example, on your screen, you will see a big view of the person you're having video chat with and a small video of yourself but on their screen it's the opposite. And this is something that can be really hard for children to understand. In my studies I frequently see kids as they're trying to attract attention to something saying, look at what I'm doing, look at the little window, look at the little screen and that's because they don't understand that the other person is seeing something different. Also at this stage there's fairly limited motor skills and frequently no literacy or very low literacy where they may be able to recognize certain words but not legitimately read yet. Technology use at this stages should still be fairly limited, those are the recommendations, just a few minutes a day if any. And now, I also want to add a little bit about the motor skill. So here's a very interesting study, so do you remember when we talked about the Fitz's law? This idea of asking people to tap between two targets as fast as they can. It's a good way of kind of figuring out how good your interface is and also how fast they can actually do that task. And so the top one and this is from a study by a good friend of mine, Juan Pablo Corque. The top one is, an adult tapping between two targets and all the traces of their tapping are shown as a grey line. So as you see, they're pretty good. They started one target at the end of another. There's a little bit of adjustment in between. The bottom one, the first one is 5 year old stepping between two targets. Now you see there's a lot more wild motion there. A lot more trying to zero in on a target. And then when you get to 4 year old. I mean, you really have to zoom out from those two dots. Because there are some kids that are just kind of going all over the place. So using a mouse and clicking in this way is actually really difficult for young children. So that's something to keep in mind while you design systems. In fact, in my opinion, that is why the iPad has been so successful because you can actually directly manipulated something on a screen rather than having to kind of try to associate the position of something on a table with the position of a cursor on a screen. So now let's grow a little bit older, 7 to 11 Years Olds. So I think this is me at ten and still in Belarus at this point. That's why I'm wearing Belarusian gear. So, this is the concrete operational stage. So at this stage, children do develop logical thinking skills but it's still fairly rigid. One of the thing that is really missing is abstract or hypothetical thinking. Not something that you develop as you grow a little bit older. That's the key skill that kind of signals you're advance to the next stage. At this age, children do have motor skills but still fairly limited literacy and vocabulary, so you should still be limiting the time you ask the child to type something in. Or you should have a really good spellchecker to make sure that if they type something in you can actually figure out what they meant by that. You should limit the kinds of vocabulary you use in your interface. And if possible you should keep things fairly visual. And growing older, now in the United States the sullen teenager. The formal operational stage is the signal of logical abstract thinking. The key skill that kind of signifies this stage and is the marker of this stage is scientific reasoning about the world. Being able to frame hypotheses and decide how you will actually test those. Now, at this age kids may appear to be close to adults in many skills such as motor literacy but there's still kind of developing the skill of understanding of who they are? What is their identity? What are their values? The one thing that's kind of interesting about this stage is that, a child may actually look in some like an adult sometimes. But they still may make decisions the way that children do. Especially if they're in a hurry, if a teenager is not given the opportunity to reflect on something they will frequently reason about it the way a child would. So, definitely its own stage and something to consider when designing. So the main way to design for children is not just to keep these stages in mind and these general guidelines in mind. But actually involved with the design process. So this is known as the onion. So this is from a famous paper by Allison Druin, that talks about the potential roles that in child can have and design process. And as we go out from the center that means that the child has more role in the process. So, perhaps the child is just the user of a system. It wasn't designed with children, it wasn't designed for children, [INAUDIBLE] perhaps they're using it. And if you know the children are going to be users of your system, I would actually recommend avoiding this. And I would say in fact, a few other things that you shouldn't do. You shouldn't think that you are like the user. You shouldn't just imagine yourself being a child and trying to use your interface and figuring out what's confusing or not. Because you can't unknow something. So you can't unknow how to read for example. So adults make really poor children when they're trying to pretend. You definitely shouldn't treat parents or teachers as proxies for children. So asking a parent, what do you think your child would like? I mean, it would lead to a very parent centered approach to that. Chances are you'll be missing a lot of the opinions and views and actual struggles and challenges and opportunities that a real child would have. In response to the same question, If you just ask parents and teachers about that child. And also of course don't think that all children are the same. Just because maybe, you have kids maybe you had them try your technology. They had no trouble doesn't mean that it's going to work for all children. And this is actually quite common in research because that's what professors do, we test stuff with our kids, but professors kids are not necessarily representative of the whole population. So it's still really important to do user testing with the right population and actually get beyond just treating the person as somebody who will use your system after it's done. So maybe you want to involve the child a little bit more. So you might actually give them a role as a tester. So this is an image of me as a younger student and we were designing a system to help teach deaf toddlers sign language and idea was they played with toys and as they played with toys. There was an interpreter on the screen that will teach the new vocabulary in sign language. And so we didn't really have an opportunity to work with the children as we were designing the system but we did have the opportunity to test our assertions and actually ask them to try it out and see what happen. And while this is better than not ever trying out a system with actual kids. I would still discourage this approach. One of the things we found is that, we made a lot of wrong assumptions about how kids would actually use the system and what they would attend to as they used it. We could have avoided that if we had in fact worked with children earlier in the design process. So, perhaps then if you want to involve children even more, you might have them be involved as an informant. So, this is a drawing that a child made in response to a question. If you could have any technology to help you and your parents stay connected, this was a child who lived apart from his dad. What would I do? In this case, it was a robot that carries secret messages that actually drew something in response to that question. And so here even before I started actually building something, I'm actually working with kids to understand what are the good opportunities and challenges to go something. I'm asking them to inform my design. And I think as we've maybe discussed before but I'll return to this, is that it doesn't mean that you then need to go out and build a robot that carries secret messages. But rather you need to understand what's underlying at the core of this response, which is that privacy was actually pretty important to this kid. He didn't want his mom to know when he was interacting with his dad, because he was kind of, this was a divorce family. He was very aware of a sort of competition over his time and affection. But, if you want to involve children even more in the process, you can really think about them as design partners. So, if a child is a design partner, they actually carry power in this relationship. So, it's not just you as a researcher trying to get information from them and then use that information. But rather they have the agency to guide design and they are involve in all the stages of the process. So what you're seeing here is from a participatory design study I run last summer where we asked, where we worked with children for 14 sessions. Altogether, we taught them what is like to be an inventor. And that we ask them to work with us to invent technologies that could make children happier. So in this case this is a system designed by kids and prototype by kids on paper as you see here, it's called thought aquarium. The idea was that it reads your mind and it represents each thought you have as a fish and so the thoughts that are good, so that's the thoughts like I am smart or I'm good at math, will kind of come to the foreground. And bad thoughts that you have about yourself, like insecurities and these kinds of things will swim away to the background. This is kind of an idea that the kids had about it. And so the key with design, participatory design, cooperative inquiry and similar approaches is to treat the child as a design partner. Again, they're not a lemon to squeeze data out of, they are actually an equal participant in the process and should guide how you actually run the study and how you partner with them throughout the process. Now, what's actually right for your project may vary. So not every project has an opportunity to partner with children as design partners. But I would suggest that the closer to the outside of this onion that you can get in your design process the better the overall design will be. And I would certainly recommend at least working with children as informants, if you're actually designing technology for children. So, as I mentioned the theme of this video and a few videos in this module has been Universal Design. Designing for children, in this case, also forces you to accommodate for a lot of other things, that may apply to more than just children. So limited literacy, there's lots of people in this world who can't read or who may not be able to see the letters well enough to be able to read them. Limited motor ability, so a lot of the same kind of pointing challenges that young children have are the same pointing challenges that we see in people with disabilities or people later in their life. Limited cognitive abilities, you kind of have to make things very simple for kids and this may be a cure interface overall more usable. Limited knowledge and lastly, I think kids have this inherent need for fun that, we all recognize the need to be engaged by the system that they're using. So if you think about that upfront in the end you're just going to make your system, your design, your user interface stronger. So of course, I can only give a very brief overview here, so for more information, I really encourage you to look at this book by Juan Pablo Hourcade, he was the one who actually did the pointing studies as well. This book is available free for download. So just go to the CRL and you'll be able to see the whole book. It goes through a lot of kind of previous work in design for children but also the kind of psychosocial development of children as well. So thank you and I hope to see you in the next video.
