Pre-school children’s interaction with large multi-touch screen: a Fitts’ law based touch accuracy evidence
List of Authors
  • Lau Siong Hoe , Liew Tze Hui

Keyword
  • Large Multi-Touch Screen, Fitts’ Law, Catch-the-Stars, Interactive Technology, Pre-School Children, Touch Accuracy

Abstract
  • This study presents the results of an experimental test on the interaction between pre-school children with an interactive technology. Interactive technology is defined as a mixture of hardware and or software that users interact with in order to achieve specific tasks. Interactive Technology is now ubiquitous in today’s 24-hour connected world where its existence is just about impossible to ignore. For pre-school children, excessive interaction with interactive technology is harmful for their healthy growth and development, therefore, the question is how can pre-school children harness the positive aspects of interactive technology? To understand this problem space, Fitts’ law has been employed to examine in depth the factors that influence the effectiveness of pre-school children’s interaction and performance with interactive technology. In this study, the Catch-the-Stars application was designed based on the Fitts’ Law Motor Learning and Performance design guideline to investigate the moderating effects of age towards the size of targets (Stars) and the coordinate position of the targets on the screen with the speed and accuracy of touch by pre-school children. A large screen, namely 21.5” all-in-one multi-touch screen that was employed in this study were the hardware, while the Catch-the-Stars application served as the software content. The combination of the 21.5” multi-touch screen and the Catch-the-Stars in this study is therefore defined as the interactive system that has been intentionally set up for the pre-school children to interact with, in order to achieve the goals of this study. The highest touch accuracy is 169, while the lowest is 139. The difference of 20 touch accuracy indicate that the bottom-left corner of the 21.5” screen is the blind pixel that the HCI designer should avoid when designing for pre-school children. Comparatively, the center column has received the 3 highest numbers of touch accuracy which are 169, 165 and 164 respectively. The results indicate that in child-computer interaction, screen size, object location coordinate and object size are important factors that influence touch accuracy on the large multi-touch screen.

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