Instructor: Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo
Teaching Assistant: Stephen Aldriedge

Project Description:
The Glowing Rhythm is a tablet application, designed for children ages four to seven, which evokes creativity through a multi-sensory experience. It combines tangible interaction using soft objects with visual content. It creates an integrated physical and virtual environment, for children, which makes learning more interesting than general tablet applications.
Figure 1. Application In Use
Through the use of a soft tangible object, The Glowing Rhythm allows children to choose a color of the animation on the screen. They may then place a second object and choose another color, or have a friend pick a color of their own choosing. The application will mix the two colors where the animations overlap on screen, showing the resultant color in this overlapped area.
User Study Method:
Over the course of a month, we conducted four separate user studies of The Glowing Rhythm.
The first user study was held on November 12, 2013 and consisted of one user, a three year old girl named Sunshine. We began this user study by asking Sunshine a few simple questions, such as "Do you like to color?" and "What is your favorite color?”. She replied excitedly nodding her head yes to our first question and pointed to her purple pants when we asked the second question. We then introduced two prototypes of our tangible objects. Both of these prototypes were constructed out of white felt, conductive fabric, conductive thread, and polyester; however, the first object was larger than the second. We asked Sunshine to play with the larger toy, and she proceeded to squish it like any other stuffed toy. We then proceeded to show her a third prototype of our tangible object. This prototype was similar to the smaller prototype Sunshine had already seen, but it had colored felt sewn on the top to help differentiate the top from the bottom of the object. We asked her if she liked the toys, and she nodded her head yes. We then showed Sunshine how an object could be placed on the tablet and an animation would show on the screen. She immediately wanted to try herself, but had a difficult time touching the conductive thread on the top of the object. Once she placed her hand flat on the top of the object, she began enthusiastically playing with the app. We then showed her that she could rotate the object to change the color. Sunshine repeatedly attempted this, but it turned out to be a difficult task for her. We then asked her to play with two objects at once, which she tried but also never grasped. Throughout this user study, we collected our data through observation and pictures. We

noticed that the larger tangible object worked much better for Sunshine's small hands, but that the object needed more points of conductive thread on the top of the object to make it more useable. We also noticed that Sunshine would try and use the two prototypes that had no colored felt on them upside down; however, she never made that mistake with the prototype that had the colored felt on it.
This confirmed the need to have the distinction of up and down on our final objects. With Sunshine, we also noticed that when the object was not working, she would begin squeezing it from the sides, deforming its shape. To fix this, we added strips of felt to the stuffing of the objects, to make them firmer.
The next user study that we conducted was held at the Children's Museum of Brazos Valley on
November 23, 2013. This user study was much larger, consisting of a total of sixteen children, all between the ages of two and ten. Since this user study was much larger, we created a script of our interaction with the users beforehand. During the user study, we followed this script fairly closely. We began by introducing ourselves and asking the children what their name was. We then asked the same questions that we asked Sunshine during her user study. Every user responded that they did like to color, but only about half of the users had a favorite color. We then showed them our objects and had them place one on the tablet. All of the users were thrilled when they saw a color show up on the screen. We then showed them how they could rotate the objects to choose a color. Only about half of the users grasped this concept. For most of the users that were younger than five years old, the concept of changing the color seemed to not stick in their memory. However, the older users tended to enjoy this feature the most. Then, if the child was playing by themselves, we introduced the second object to them and asked them to play with both objects. If we had more than one user at our station, two of them had an object so they were able to play with each other. Once the user(s) had two objects interacting with the tablet, we pointed out that they could mix the two chosen colors by overlapping the animations on screen. This seemed to be fascinating to most of the users that were four years old or older. The younger users seemed to be interested in simply naming the color that they chose with their object instead of the mixed ‘new’ color. Since this user study was much larger, we collected all of our data by continuously filming our users with a video camera. This allowed us to review each child's individual reaction and analyze any issues they encountered while playing. Some of these issues included confusing which side was the top of the objects; much like Sunshine did with our first two prototypes. The problem of squeezing the objects from the side also surfaced during this user study.
The third user study we conducted was at the Fall 2013 Undergraduate VIST Show on December
5, 2013. We received a large amount of users at this user study also; however, all but three of them were adults. During this user study, we would have the users approach our station and ask them if they wanted to try using our app. If they said yes, we would hand them an object and explain that they needed to touch the top of the objects while moving it around on the tablet. We also explained the rotation feature. Most of the adults proceeded to ask how it works, so we would explain how the tangible objects were constructed. Many of the users were immediately successful. However, some users tried to drag the animation off the screen, where the tablet lost the touch points of the tangible objects. We also noticed that these touch points were hard for the tablet to read due to the objects flattening out with so much usage. We still received positive feedback from most of the users.
Our last user study was held at The Chocolate Gallery in Bryan, TX on December 6, 2013. During this user study, we only had two users, one of which was five years old and the other was her two year

old brother. We proceeded to follow the same process that we went through at the Children's Museum of Brazos Valley. These two users were shy to start, but quickly began playing together excitedly.
During this user study, we saw the same problems as we previously saw, like the tablet losing the connection between the objects and the screen.
These four user studies allowed us to discover many issues that we need to address in order to further our project. The first of these fixes is to improve our tangible objects in several ways. This includes finding a way to clearly mark the top of the objects, so that the younger children do not try and use it upside down. Another way to improve the tangible objects would be to find a firm yet soft material to stuff the toys with. We find that polyester and felt is simply too easy to squish and deform.
Throughout these user studies, we also discovered the need to find a way to make the connection between the object and the tablet stronger. We would also like to add sound into our app in order to make it more interesting for children. The addition of sound would allow children to begin corresponding various colors with certain sounds. We have also discovered the possibility of largely improving The Glowing Rhythm by expanding it to a larger touch surface. This would allow more children to play at once and convert the app into a possible learning tool for larger groups of kids.