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- Crescendo: Routine Learning App for Children with Autism Spectrum DisordersPublication . Cesário, Vanessa; Rodrigues, Joel; Li, Helen; Wu, Iris; Nisi, ValentinaCrescendo is an ongoing project aimed to provide children with High Functioning Autism, their teachers and carers with a communication tool that bridges them. Crescendo guides carers in teaching and immersing their child in a virtual environment that mimics the real world, helping them to make sense of it and interact with objects and places in order to become self-reliant in atomized, step-by-step routines. Crescendo is a two-sided app design, one for carers and another for children. It provides both with tool for monitoring and incremental step-by-step learning.
- Designing with teenagers: A teenage perspective on enhancing mobile museum experiencesPublication . Cesário, Vanessa; Nisi, ValentinaTeenagers are an understudied group within the Interaction Design and Children community. Museums and cultural heritage spaces offer solutions for young children but none that are specifically targeted to teenagers. The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. This paper centres on the presentation and discussion of several design sessions deployed with 155 teenage participants aged 15-19. They were asked to ideate a mobile museum experience that they would enjoy. Through qualitative analysis, the disparities in suggestions about story-based apps vs. game-based apps show that teenagers might value gamification over narratives. This work generates design recommendations for mobile museum tour guides for teenagers, to be used by both curators and museum designers in engaging teenagers in museum exhibitions. We also contrast the game and narrative mechanics produced by teenagers with what is already known. Finally, we answer the questions of how these findings align with existing museum guides for teenagers and how other designers can design with teenagers for this domain.
- Augmented Reality Museum’s Gaming for Digital Natives: Haunted Encounters in the Carvalhal’s PalacePublication . Nisi, Valentina; Cesário, Vanessa; Nunes, NunoMemories of Carvalhal’s Palace – Haunted Encounters is an Aug mented Reality (AR) location-based game which involves players in uncovering the mystery behind the haunted aspects of a museum premises. The game de ployed at the Natural History Museum of Funchal makes use of mobile interac tive AR and gaming strategies to promote the engagement of teenage visitors (digital natives) in museum experiences. Through this game, the audience em barks in a journey through the museum spaces, collecting scientific information about selected exhibits, while interacting with their tridimensional (3D) AR mod els. The audience’s interactions with the museum exhibits are rewarded with pieces of a map, which will guide them to a hidden location, the scientific library of the museum. There participants can finally unlock the mysteries they have been summoned to solve. The game’s goal stems from the fact that digital native teenagers are identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a mu seum’s curatorial strategies [1] and as consequence, they appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer [2]. In this article, we present the de scription and rational behind Memories of Carvalhal’s Palace: Haunted Encoun ters mobile gaming application and then discuss the results of first empirical tests performed to evaluate the usefulness and usability of the game.
- Gaming versus storytelling: understanding children’s interactive experiences in a museum settingPublication . Radeta, Marko; Cesário, Vanessa; Matos, Sónia; Nisi, ValentinaMuseum’s audiences are increasingly looking for compelling expe‐ riences where, besides learning, engagement and enjoyment are key success factors. While gaming and storytelling are considered to be common approaches to engage audiences with a museum’s collections, a formal comparison of the two has not been found in literature. In this paper, we present the design and compa‐ rative study of two distinct interventions, namely a mobile game and a mobile story that were designed to engage a young audience with the exhibit of the local natural history museum. Focusing on the same scientific content derived from the museum’s collection, we compare the effects of both interactive experiences on a group of children. When comparing engagement, enjoyment and learning outcomes, we correlate results with data derived from observations and skin conductance biofeedback. The data collected so far suggest that children are 27% more excited when using the game application compared with the story driven one. Moreover, we find that children’s excitement peaks when encountering selected artefacts presented in the museum exhibit. Finally, children’s learning nearly doubled (44%) when using the game based experience versus the story. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings and by proposing potential future improvements.
- Shifting from the Children to the Teens’ Usability: Adapting a Gamified Experience of a Museum TourPublication . Cesário, Vanessa; Radeta, Marko; Coelho, António; Nisi, ValentinaIn this poster, we are addressing the topic of "system’s evaluation" from the point of view of assessing the usability of a gamified experience with 20 teenagers aged 15-17 years. The currently tested experience was ideally designed for children 9-10 years. In order to adapt the application to teenagers, we tested it with 20 targeted users. In this poster, we share the results and encourage a discussion among the researchers about how to adapt the gamified experience designed for children to a teenage audience.
- Children's books: Paper VS Digital, What Do They Prefer?Publication . Cesário, Vanessa; Freitas, Paulo; Pimentel, Diana; Nisi, ValentinaIn this paper we present a study through which we intended to understand children’s preference towards book formats, in particular digital or paper ones. To accomplish this, we created an original story (Ritinha) illustrated by two children. The traditional book format was composed by static images and text. The digital format had animated images, hyperlinks to navigate to different parts of the story and static text complemented by an audio narrative. We conducted a field study with 105 children in order to observe in which format children would prefer to read a book: if in paper or in digital format. The method used to accomplish this task was direct observation.