Robots for Inclusive Play: Co-designing an Educational Game With Visually Impaired and sighted Children

2020. Oussama Metatla, Sandra Bardot, Clare Cullen, Marcos Serrano & Christophe Jouffrais
Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

Despite being included in mainstream schools, visually impaired children still face barriers to social engagement and participation. Games could potentially help, but games that cater for both visually impaired and sighted players are scarce. We used a co-design approach to design and evaluate a robot-based educational game that could be inclusive of both visually impaired and sighted children in the context of mainstream education. We ran a focus group discussion with visual impairment educators to understand barriers to inclusive play. And then a series of co-design workshops to engage visually impaired and sighted children and educators in learning about robot technology and exploring its potential to support inclusive play experiences. We present design guidelines and an evaluation workshop of a game prototype, demonstrating group dynamics conducive to collaborative learning experiences, including shared goal setting/execution, closely coupled division of labour, and interaction symmetry.

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Citation

Metatla, O., Bardot, S., Cullen, C., Serrano, M., & Jouffrais, C. (2020). Robots for inclusive play: co-designing an educational game with visually impaired and sighted children. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–13). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376270, doi:10.1145/3313831.3376270

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3313831.3376270,
author = {Metatla, Oussama and Bardot, Sandra and Cullen, Clare and Serrano, Marcos and Jouffrais, Christophe},
title = {Robots for Inclusive Play: Co-designing an Educational Game With Visually Impaired and sighted Children},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450367080},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376270},
doi = {10.1145/3313831.3376270},
abstract = {Despite being included in mainstream schools, visually impaired children still face barriers to social engagement and participation. Games could potentially help, but games that cater for both visually impaired and sighted players are scarce. We used a co-design approach to design and evaluate a robot-based educational game that could be inclusive of both visually impaired and sighted children in the context of mainstream education. We ran a focus group discussion with visual impairment educators to understand barriers to inclusive play. And then a series of co-design workshops to engage visually impaired and sighted children and educators in learning about robot technology and exploring its potential to support inclusive play experiences. We present design guidelines and an evaluation workshop of a game prototype, demonstrating group dynamics conducive to collaborative learning experiences, including shared goal setting/execution, closely coupled division of labour, and interaction symmetry.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {1–13},
numpages = {13},
keywords = {co-design, education, games, inclusion, visual impairment},
location = {Honolulu, HI, USA},
series = {CHI '20}
}