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© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
This problem and its solution are not just of interest to kids, there are many examples of people who could benefit: co-workers comparing changes in a common development project; students demonstrating code problems to instructors; novice computer users soliciting help from experts; classmates revising a joint document; people preparing a presentation. All of these face-to-face interactions could be augmented by computer support.
In the past, research on augmenting face-to-face interaction has focused on shared drawing boards and computerized meeting rooms[7]. These systems use either expensive or proprietary hardware to accomplish their goals. My research focuses upon how to design software tools that allow us to add multiple input devices to existing hardware systems. These tools will allow users to take advantage of face-to-face interaction while retaining the flexibility and ease of use of working on separate systems. With MMM[3], Bier and Freeman provide a proof of principle for single display collaboration, but what is needed now is a powerful application with a rich enough problem domain to examine what is possible on a single display.
Hollan and Stornetta argue that the study of group work must move "beyond being there"[6]. By limiting our computer interfaces to what we already know, in this case mimicking face-to-face interaction, we don't capture the untapped potential that new computer media holds. They believe, as do I, that a collaborative application will be judged successful not only because physically distant people use it to make their interaction feel like face-to-face, but also because people already interacting face-to-face use the tool to augment their interactions.
I believe there are two interrelated reasons why kids love zooming. It is the first time they have experienced computers as something different than the 2-D paper world. With zooming, they can get in really close and see the pupil of a cows eye, or they can back way out see the whole herd of cattle stampeding on their display. The other reason kids like zooming is that it's active‹like riding a roller coaster. Kids want their computer worlds to be active and especially reactive. When they touch or move objects around things happen‹objects bump, drag, crash or smush against each other. Paper cannot provide this. Kids want expressive environments flexible enough to allow them to create their own worlds[4]. Kids do not just want to go around pushing buttons that somebody else has created, like an interactive textbook, they want to be the ones to decide what happens and be able to make it themselves.
Our experimentation with local tools provides convenient solutions to many of the conflicts caused when multiple users access interface elements. With local tools, all interface elements become tools that sit on the surface alongside the data objects that they create and manipulate[1]. All aspects of tools are self contained‹I pick up the fat, red crayon to draw with and no other user can change its line width or color as long as I've got it. The local tools metaphor is very direct, functionality is no longer hidden in menus or dialogue boxes, but instead directly available on the work surface. I believe the local tool metaphor is flexible, powerful, and very closely models how kids actually work. Pad++ provides other facilities such as portals and lenses that may help with problems caused by multiple simultaneous users[2]. Portals provide embedded views onto a data surface, thus creating an efficient way to enable users to view different parts of the data space at the same time. Lenses provide a way to change how users can interact with objects. This can be used to allow users to create objects that only they can manipulate, or story elements that only they can see.
As argued earlier, Sushi needs to provide a reactive environment. Users need to be able to specify what kinds of events should trigger reactions. The reactions they specify should include playing sounds, making size or color changes, or even animating objects across the surface. I must devise an interface simple enough for the kids to use, while still allowing this type of powerful features.
In order to try and keep track of which users did what, it is important that objects within Sushi maintain their own history. This means implementing a form of graphical history with multiple authors. One effect of this is the ability to create a ShowMe tool. This tool would allow users to escape the blank page syndrome by looking at someone else's work and asking the objects within "how were you created?" Because local tools live on the data surface along with the story elements, the ShowMe tool could also be used to learn how a particular tool is used.
After the iterative design process with the elementary school users is finished and Sushi is complete, a number of quantitative and qualitative tests will be run to examine how effectively a local tools SDG system augments the face-to-face interaction of the users. Sushi will be compared to an identical system without any collaborative support on a single computer as well as an identical system which supports collaboration on multiple computers across a network. By videotaping and scoring users in each of these situations I hope to be able to determine whether Sushi sucessfully augmented user's collaborative behavior.
2. Benjamin B. Bederson, James D. Hollan, Ken Perlin, Jon Meyer, David Bacon, and George Furnas. "Pad++: A Zoomable Graphical Sketchpad for Exploring Alternate Interface Physics", Journal of Visual Languages and Computing(7), 1996, 3-31.
3. Eric A. Bier and Steve Freeman. "MMM: A User Interface architecture forShared Editors on a Single Screen". Proceedings of UIST'91, ACM Press, 79-86.
4. Allison Druin and Cynthia Solomon. Designing Multimedia Environments for Children: Computers, Creativity, and Kids. John Wiley & Sons, NY, 1996. 5. Allison Druin, Jason Stewart, David Proft, Ben Bederson, and Jim Hollan. "KidPad: A Design Collaboration Between Children, Technologists, and Educators". Submitted to CHI'97.
6. Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta. "Beyond Being There". Proceedings of CSCW'92. ACM Press, 119-125.
7. J. F. Nunamaker, Alan R. Dennis, Joseph S. Valacich, Douglas R. Vogel, and Joey F. George. "Electronic Meeting Systems to Support Group Work". Communications of the ACM, 34(7), July 1991, 40-61.
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