• Figure 2. Tabletop
surface with toys.

not have 3-D avatars in the virtual farm; e.g., a little
bucket toy was spontaneously used to feed the ani-
mals. These first experiences directed us in how to
implement a more structured game.

• Figure 3. Our little members testing in the lab.

January + February 2010

interactions

Team Work With Children in Lab

After the first group of children played the initial
version of the farm game, a pair of children (a four-
year-old boy and a three-year-old girl) became more
involved in our project. Their parents were able to
bring them to our lab once a week, so the children
became familiar with us and our environment. In
this way, children took on the role of testers for
each new implementation we made to the game [ 5]
(see Figure 3).
At this stage, the farm game had a structure and
goals. Children had to locate on the farm where
each animal ate. We implemented a 3-D virtual
farmer character for the 3-D farm. This charac-
ter could promote children to carry out activities,
detect if they were having problems or staying inac-
tive for a long time, and encourage them to play.
Here we received the first feedback from children in
relation to the tone of voice and the way the farmer
spoke to them. In the first version, the children did
not like his voice, and they interpreted some of his
expressions as yelling.
As the game was interactive, we had a new
design element to worry about: Could children
easily do the actions we were asking of them?
Most of the actions required that children place a
particular toy near a virtual farm object; of inter-
est to the developer was learning how precise
the children’s movements would have to be. We
implemented keyboard shortcuts to change these
restrictions while they were playing: If we detect-
ed they were having problems placing the toys on
a particular spot, we could modify the size of the
hot spot until children could perform the action
without difficulty.
During play, children helped us create new ways
of interacting with the toys. A boy was lifting the
hen toy on and off the table, playfully jumping
the object. When we asked him what he was try-
ing to do, he answered that he wanted the hen
to lay eggs. Later, we implemented new code to
detect jumps and added a nest for the hen. We
tested this at the next test session. After refining
the timing of the action, we observed that laying
eggs became a favorite activity of the children who
played. Nevertheless, a new kind of design problem

[ 3] Druin, A. “The
Role of Children in
the Design of New
Technology.” In
Behaviour & Information
Technology 21, 1 (2002):
1–25.
[ 4] Scaife, M., Rogers,
Y. “Kids as Informants:
Telling Us What
We Didn’t Know or
Confirming What We
Knew Already?” In The
Design of Children’s
Technology, ed.
Druin, A. 27–50. San
Francisco: Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers,
1998.
[ 5] Markopoulos, P.,
Read, J., MacFarlane,
S., Hoysniemi, J.
Evaluating Children’s
Interactive Products:
Principles and
Practices for Interaction
Designers (Interactive
Technologies). San
Francisco: Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers,
2008.

improvisation of the first group of children who vis-
ited our lab.
As we understood children’s experiences play-
ing with NIKVision, the farm game changed and
evolved, while the role of the children during the
design process changed from that of informant to
that of user [ 3, 4].
At the first stage, children got involved in our lab
test as “informants.” Their role was to give clear
design ideas for the structure of the game. As noted
by others, we recognized that with children ages
three to four, significant effort would be needed to
establish “equal” communication channels between
children and adults. In our first informant sessions,
we let children play NIKVision together with their
parents, which made the children comfortable with
our lab and the tabletop. We could observe them
playing and take notes of the interactions between
the children and the toy animals to determine
which of these interactions was especially fun for
children. In order to observe improvisation, we
decided to introduce new toys to the game that did