Are Tangibles More Fun? Comparing Children's Enjoyment and Engagement Using Physical, Graphical and Tangible User Interfaces Lesley Xie, Alissa N. Antle, Nima Motamedi School of Interactive Arts and Technology Simon Fraser University, Surrey, B.C., Canada V3T 0A3 {zxie, aantle, nimam}@sfu.ca ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of an exploratory comparative study in which we investigated the relationship between interface style and school-aged children’s enjoyment and engagement while doing puzzles. Pairs of participants played with a jigsaw puzzle that was implemented using three different interface styles: physical (traditional), graphical and tangible. In order to investigate interactional differences between the three interface styles, we recorded subjective ratings of enjoyment, three related subscales, measured times and counts of behavioral based indications of engagement. Qualitative analysis based on observational notes and audio responses to open interview questions helped contextualize the quantitative findings and provided key insights into interactional differences not apparent in the quantitative findings. We summarize our main findings and discuss the design implications for tangible user interfaces. Author Keywords Interface style, enjoyment, engagement, children, play, puzzles, tangible user interfaces. ACM Classification Keywords H5.2. User interfaces INTRODUCTION Computation has been used to augment children’s play in a variety of ways [7,16,17]. A recent trend is the application of tangible user interfaces (TUIs) to children’s learning, play-based applications and products (e.g., [4,14,22,23,24, 33]). Much of the research in this area has focused on the development and descriptive analysis of new tangible systems. This research is grounded in implicit assumptions that tangible style interfaces, which rely on direct physical manipulation and support face-to-face collaboration, are more “natural” and thus more enjoyable and engaging for children than desktop environments. However, few empirical studies address these claims [4,14]. Compared to graphical style desktop systems there has been little research that explicitly and systematically explores the advantages of tangible systems. The claims of the benefits of tangible interaction remain speculative. It is unknown how the properties of tangible interaction will contribute to enjoyment and engagement in tangible games for school age children. Understanding these issues will contribute to grounding this technology agenda in empirical studies; inform the development of stronger frameworks for the theory and practice of play-based learning with tangibles; and lead to the development of principles to guide the design of new forms of tangibles. This paper presents a comparative study exploring how interface style related interaction factors impact enjoyment and engagement in jigsaw puzzle games under a collaborative condition for 132 school-aged children (7-9 years old). The main contribution of the study documented in this paper is that it is the first empirical comparison of physical (traditional), graphical and tangible interfaces for school-aged children. A second contribution is the development of an extensible tabletop prototype, which uses fiducial markers and a camera vision system to track user driven events, such as the connection of two or more puzzle pieces. The third contribution is the set of design recommendations for the development of enjoyable and engaging tangibles. BACKGROUND Tangible User Interfaces Tangible user interfaces and tangible interaction are terms increasingly gaining currency within the human computer interaction community [11]. The last decade has seen a wave of new research concerned with the coupling of the physical and digital worlds. Tangible user interfaces utilize physical representation, manipulation of digital data and offer interactive couplings of physical artifacts with computationally mediated digital information [11]. Many different research projects have studied enabling technologies, usability aspects and various applications of tangible user interfaces (e.g., [10,11,24,31]). Projects utilizing augmented tabletop environments have demonstrated tabletops’ potential value (e.g., [2,20]). One major advantage that has been identified with for tabletops is that they can support synchronous co-located collaboration. However, little is known about how and why such environments can be designed to support successful social interactions. The development of tangible systems specifically targeted to children is also a growing research area. It builds on past research themes, which have explored how technology can Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. TEI 2008, February 18–20, 2008, Bonn, Germany. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-004-3/08/02...$5.00. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI'08), Feb 18-20 2008, Bonn, Germany 191