Digital Libraries for Children:
Technology Development


Our research is concerned with four main areas of technology implementation: querying, browsing, organization and presentation.  In each of these four areas, information visualization, collaboration technologies, and impact on children’s learning experiences will be considered.
 

Visual Query Specification:

Today’s most common query interfaces rely on boolean text keyword searches.  This is difficult for young children to negotiate due to their need for more concrete representations of ideas.  Children need ways to support their creativity.  If for example, they want ideas to make a scary summer movie, they may say “I’m looking for pictures of fish that eat other animals." Below are screen snapshots of our first working prototype.
Left: This where the children begin.
They can go to the zoo, find animals
in the world, or search by category.		 Right: This is where children search.
They can search in four ways. 


The query results for fish that eat
other animals.


Browsing:

Children love the process of exploration.  Children want a way to visually explore, therefore we are building upon the work led by Professor Ben Bederson in zoomable user interfaces. Through our experience developing and testing systems that incorporate real-time continuous zooming as the primary navigation mechanism, we know that many users (adults and children alike) prefer zooming to non-zooming systems.  We have found with the demonstration project of KidPad, a zooming storytelling tool for children, that children are thoroughly engaged when zooming through information. We theorize this may in part be due to the visual context and relationships zooming allows.  As we have seen, children and adults discuss “traveling” to objects on the screen.  The act of zooming from one object to the next, makes visually explicit where users are going and where they have been.  In traditional systems that don’t use zooming to navigate, different objects that are semantically related are linked visually by jumping from one object to the next (e.g., links on the Web).  Children have explained this as “closing your eyes and when you open them you’re in a new place.  Zooming lets you keep your eyes open.”
 

Information Organization and Presentation:

Children enjoy the social experience of learning through collaboration, not just with distant collaborators, but with children right in the same room. We consider co-located collaboration tools a priority in supporting children as researchers.  Currently we have developed a version of KidPad that supports the use of simultaneous users at the same computer at the same time.  They each have their own input device and can work simultaneously.  We call this approach Single Display Groupware.  We intend to build on this initial research and develop new interface tools that support multiple users at one screen.  Children will need to collect media from their browsing and querying.  They will need to take notes and they will want to collaborate throughout this reflective inquiry process.  Therefore, know that these organizational tools must be as shareable as a box of crayons, yet as easy to organize as sticking pushpins into a bulletin board.

Three children using KidPad with three mice



 

This 3-year research project is supported by the
National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative-2
 
 

Introduction......Project Description......When we began......How we work with children.....Technology Development.....Download KidPad
 

For more information on our research, contact:
Professor Allison Druin: allisond@umiacs.umd.edu