Evaluating Children's Interactive Products directly addresses the need to ensure that interactive products designed for children — whether toys, games, educational products, or websites — are safe, effective, and entertaining. It presents an essential background in child development and child psychology, particularly as they relate to technology; captures best practices for observing and surveying children, training evaluators, and capturing the child user experience using audio and visual technology; and examines ethical and legal issues involved in working with children and offers guidelines for effective risk management. Based on the authors' workshops, conference courses, and own design experience and research, this highly practical book reads like a handbook, while being thoroughly grounded in the latest research. Throughout, the authors illustrate techniques and principles with numerous mini case studies and highlight practical information in tips and exercises and conclude with three in-depth case studies. This book is recommended for usability experts, product developers, and researchers in the field. - Presents an essential background in child development and child psychology, particularly as they relate to technology - Captures best practices for observing and surveying children, training evaluators, and capturing the child user experience using audio and visual technology - Examines ethical and legal issues involved in working with children and offers guidelines for effective risk management

Children are one of the largest new user groups of mobile technology -- from phones to micro-laptops to electronic toys. These products are both lauded and criticized, especially when it comes to their role in education and learning. The need has never been greater to understand how these technologies are being designed and to evaluate their impact worldwide. Mobile Technology for Children brings together contributions from leaders in industry, non-profit organizations, and academia to offer practical solutions for the design and the future of mobile technology for children. - First book to present a multitude of voices on the design, technology, and impact of mobile devices for children and learning - Features contributions from leading academics, designers, and policy makers from nine countries, whose affiliations include Sesame Workshop, LeapFrog Enterprises, Intel, the United Nations, and UNICEF - Each contribution and case study is followed by a best practice overview to help readers consider their own research and design and for a quick reference

The Creative Curriculum comes alive! This videotape-winner of the 1989 Silver Apple Award at the National Educational Film and Video Festival-demonstrates how teachers set the stage for learning by creating a dynamic well-organized environment. It shows children involved in seven of the interest areas in the The Creative Curriculum and explains how they learn in each area. Everyone conducts in-service training workshops for staff and parents or who teaches early childhood education courses will find the video an indispensable tool for explainin appropriate practice.

Here is the second of a four-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2007, held in Beijing, China, jointly with eight other thematically similar conferences. It covers graphical user interfaces and visualization, mobile devices and mobile interaction, virtual environments and 3D interaction, ubiquitous interaction, and emerging interactive technologies.

"Fundamentally, making games is designing with others, everyone contributing from different angles towards the best possible product. Conclusively, Garcia-Ruiz has chosen a collection of chapters that demonstrates several different aspects of working in gaming and working with others that stands to raise the level of expertise in the field." —Veronica Zammitto, Senior Lead Games User Research, Electronic Arts, Inc., from the Foreword Usability is about making a product easy to use while meeting the requirements of target users. Applied to video games, this means making the game accessible and enjoyable to the player. Video games with high usability are generally played efficiently and frequently while enjoying higher sales volumes. The case studies in this book present the latest interdisciplinary research and applications of games user research in determining and developing usability to improve the video game user experience at the human–computer interface level. Some of the areas examined include practical and ethical concerns in conducting usability testing with children, audio experiences in games, tangible and graphical game interfaces, controller testing, and business models in mobile gaming. Games User Research: A Case Study Approach provides a highly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers, and students in developing and applying methods for testing player usability as well as for conducting games user research. It gives the necessary theoretical and practical background for designing and conducting a test for usability with an eye toward modifying software interfaces to improve human–computer interaction between the player and the game.

"This book focuses on human-computer interaction related to the innovation and research in the design, evaluation, and use of innovative handheld, mobile, and wearable technologies in order to broaden the overall body of knowledge regarding such issue"--Provided by publisher.

We will be, sooner or later, not only handling personal computers but also mul- purpose cellular phones, complex personal digital assistants, devices that will be context-aware, and even wearable computers stitched to our clothes...we would like these personal systems to become transparent to the tasks they will be performing. In fact the best interface is an invisible one, one giving the user natural and fast access to the application he (or she) intends to be executed. The working group that organized this conference (the last of a long row!) tried to combine a powerful scientific program (with drastic refereeing) with an entertaining cultural program, so as to make your stay in Rome the most pleasant one all round: I do hope that this expectation becomes true. July 2005 Stefano Levialdi, IEEE Life Fellow INTERACT 2005 General Chairman [1] Peter J. Denning, ACM Communications, April 2005, vol. 48, N° 4, pp. 27-31. Editors’ Preface INTERACT is one of the most important conferences in the area of Human-Computer Interaction at the world-wide level. We believe that this edition, which for the first time takes place in a Southern European country, will strengthen this role, and that Rome, with its history and beautiful setting provides a very congenial atmosphere for this conference. The theme of INTERACT 2005 is Communicating Naturally with Computers.