Trees of Tales: Designing Playful Interactions to Enhance Reading
Experiences
Fatma Al Aamri, Stefan Greuter, Steffen P Walz
RMIT University, Australia
Designing an interactive reading experience using technology to involve children and their families in a fun reading activity.
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Proposed Solution
• Mobile technologies designed for children can change the way children learn (Druin, 2009)
• Designing for children should consider children’s (Hourcade, 2008):
– Abilities
– Interests
– Developmental needs
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Designing Interactivity for Children
• Place the educational content at the core of the game
• Provide feedback and hints to scaffold interactions that create stimulating content for a child (Fisch, 2005)
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Designing Educational Games
• E-books, which integrated corresponding interactivity into the content of the story were found to elevate the comprehension of the text.
• Features such as narration, sound effects and animation, which support the text, help to remove the effort from decoding individual words, and allow children to focus on the meaning.
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Meaningful Interactivity
‘PLACE ON STAGE’
The design and composition of all visual elements on a theatre stage, which provides the visual theme for a narrative (Bordwell & Thompson, 2012)
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MISE EN SCÈNE
Interactive reading application that was carefully designed to be playful, meaningful and enjoyable
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TREES OF TALES
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Evaluation
Parents’ surveys
Experience surveys
Fun toolkit
Printed storybooks
Arabic Stories
E-book
Trees of Tales
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Children’s Opinions
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Most Fun Ease of use Best Content
Preference
Trees of Tales
Arabic Stories e-book
Printed books
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Parents’ Opinions
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Most Fun Most Suitable
Trees of Tales
Arabic Stories e-book
Printed Books
Children found Trees of Tales the most enjoyable reading experience of the three interventions tested.
The majority of children did not find Trees of Tales as easy to use as the other interventions.
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Findings
More than 50% of the children instead picked the basic e-book application as the easiest to use.
The stories in Trees of Tales are more interesting than the stories in the other two interventions.
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More Findings
• To improve the interest of children in reading:
1. Provide school children with a variety of reading
material.
2. Use cultural related material to encourage the involvement of parents.
3. Implement playful and meaningful interactivity.
4. balance the challenge with the abilities of the reader if they want to create an optimal experience.
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Recommendations
More information about the difficulties the children encountered while using Trees of Tales would be beneficial to inform future development of such applications.
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Future Research
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