Tangible Interfaces Support Young Children’s Goal Interdependence

Abstract

Understanding how to contribute to group work is challenging, especially for young children. To have a productive group process, we need to know the mechanism of positive interdependence, which is a fundamental element of successful collaboration. Unfortunately, although there are many suggestions for promoting positive interdependence with tangible technologies, there are few guidelines for structuring children’s interdependent collaboration. Therefore, we designed two tangible games, UnitRry and CollabMaze, using weak and strong goal interdependent designs. We conducted two user studies with 32 children. Our investigation revealed three main findings. First, weak and strong goal interdependent interfaces had high enjoyment and interdependence. Second, tangible interfaces help young children have more idea communication and need less time to solve the tasks. Finally, young children using tangible interfaces were more engaged in the tasks. In the long run, our results can improve the design of tangible interfaces for young children’s collaboration and help them have a better collaborative experience. Furthermore, our findings showed the value of tangible technologies compared with tablet applications in facilitating children’s collaboration.