This paper presents a systematic literature review on collaborative technologies for children with special needs in ACM Digital Library. The aim of the review is to (1) reveal the current state of the art, (2) identify the types of technologies and contexts of use, the demographics and special needs of the target group, and the methodological approaches and theoretical groundings, and (3) define a future research agenda. The results of the systematic literature review show that collaborative technologies for children with special needs are increasingly gaining attention, mostly involve tangible and/or embodied interaction, and are often developed for use in the classroom. The target group that is most represented are boys between 6 to 12 years with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The results further show a wide range of evaluation criteria for measuring collaboration, an interchanging use of theoretical concepts and a lack of definitions for the concept collaboration, and a need for more demographically diverse studies.
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies are widely used to help non-verbal children enable communication. For AAC-aided communication to be successful, caregivers should support children with consistent intervention strategies in various settings. As such, caregivers need to continuously observe and discuss children's AAC usage to create a shared understanding of these strategies. However, caregivers often find it challenging to effectively collaborate with one another due to a lack of family involvement and the unstructured process of collaboration. To address these issues, we present TalkingBoogie, which consists of two mobile apps: TalkingBoogie-AAC for caregiver-child communication, and TalkingBoogie-coach supporting caregiver collaboration. Working together, these applications provide contextualized layouts for symbol arrangement, scaffold the process of sharing and discussing observations, and induce caregivers' balanced participation. A two-week deployment study with four groups (N=11) found that TalkingBoogie helped increase mutual understanding of strategies and encourage balanced participation between caregivers with reduced cognitive loads.
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.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376270
Feature-rich applications such as word processors and spreadsheets are not only being used by adults but increasingly by children and older adults as well. Learning these applications is challenging as they offer hundreds of commands throughout the interface. We investigate how newcomers from different age groups explore the user interface of a feature-rich application to determine, locate, and use relevant features. We conducted an in-lab observational study with 10 children (10-12), 10 adults (20-35) and 10 older adults (60-75) who were first-time users of Microsoft OneNote. Our results illustrate key exploration differences across age groups, including that children were careful and performed as efficiently as the adults, whereas older adults spent a longer time and repeated sequences of failed selections. Further, their exploration style was negatively influenced by their past knowledge of similar applications. We discuss design interventions to accommodate these exploration differences and to improve software onboarding for newcomers.