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Rapid prototyping of outdoor games for children in an iterative design process

Published: 24 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reflects on the design process of games that are played by multiple players, involving high pace activity and embodied interaction. More specifically it argues that user testing with low fidelity prototypes, which is recommended in mainstream literature on methodology in the fields of human computer interaction and game design, is not appropriate when designing these kind of games. Designers should instead, as early as possible in the design process, experiment with technology and expose working prototypes to play test with children. A case study, in which we designed several games and tested in three iterations, is also presented. The games were designed for and tested with RaPIDO, a specially designed platform for prototyping mobile and interactive technology. Finally, we argue that our hypothesis regarding technology-rich prototyping is confirmed, since the feedback from the children concerned the realized interaction, and aspects of play and social interaction were experienced in real context, instead of an imagined way as a mock-up would have allowed.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IDC '13: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
June 2013
687 pages
ISBN:9781450319188
DOI:10.1145/2485760
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 June 2013

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Author Tags

  1. children
  2. prototyping

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  • Research-article

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IDC '13
Sponsor:
  • The New School
  • ACM
  • Sesame Workshop
IDC '13: Interaction Design and Children 2013
June 24 - 27, 2013
New York, New York, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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IDC '25
Interaction Design and Children
June 23 - 26, 2025
Reykjavik , Iceland

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  • (2024)A Serious Game Prototype of Combined Cognitive Training for Alzheimer’s Patients2024 IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics and Intelligent Systems (CIS) and IEEE International Conference on Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics (RAM)10.1109/CIS-RAM61939.2024.10673387(537-542)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Collective co-design activities with children for designing classroom robotsProceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3628096.3630094(229-237)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Outside Where? A Survey of Climates and Built Environments in Studies of HCI outdoorsProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3507656(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2022)A systematic survey on embodied cognitionInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2022.10047833:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Child–Computer InteractionInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.10039832:COnline publication date: 1-Jun-2022
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  • (2020)"Otter this world"Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3392063.3394434(444-457)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Designing IoT Resources to Support Outdoor Play for ChildrenProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376302(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
  • (2020)The Design of Outdoor Technologies for ChildrenHCI Outdoors: Theory, Design, Methods and Applications10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_11(213-227)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2020
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