Title: Designing interaction in digital tabletop games to support collaborative learning in children

Authors: Manon Spermon; Imke Schouten; Elise Van den Hoven

Addresses: The work was carried out at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, the Netherlands ' The work was carried out at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, the Netherlands ' School of Design, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia; Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Abstract: According to Dillenbourg et al. (1996), collaborative learning occurs when two or more people try to learn something together. This process consists of four successive stages, one of which concerns collaborative interactions. In this paper we present two studies that implemented two different ways of increasing the number of collaborative interactions. To increase the number of collaborative interactions in a game, the first study focused on degrees of collaboration (Kahn and Mentzer, 1996) and the second study focused on cooperative gestures (Morris et al., 2006a), which were used in the third degree of the first study. In order to facilitate collaborative interactions and its properties (Dillenbourg, 1991), we decided to design two digital tabletop games with tangible interaction that both require collaboration to win. The evaluations in both studies, by means of the Wizard of Oz method, showed a significant increase in collaborative interactions. We also found that verbal and gestural interactions are a better measure criterion for tabletop games than how much people look at each other.

Keywords: collaborative learning; cooperative gestures; social interaction; digital tabletop games; tangible interaction; interaction design; children; digital games; collaboration; verbal interactions; gesture interactions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLT.2014.062446

International Journal of Learning Technology, 2014 Vol.9 No.1, pp.3 - 24

Published online: 12 Jul 2014 *

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