Scottish UPA: Child centred design and games (Tuesday 21 June)
Speakers: Suzanne Waugh and Lucy Joyner
Child-centred design has been an active area of research over the past ten years and is increasingly being adopted by industry in the U.S. This is especially the case with industry giant, ActiMates (a Microsoft affiliate) who used child-centred design when developing the hugely succesful interactive soft toys; talking Aardvarks Arthur and D.W, 'Barney the talking Dinosaur' amongst others. Involving children in the design of new technology allows us to fully understand their delicate needs as learners; existing commercial childrens software frequently lack these fundamentals. Suzanne Waugh is an expert in child centre design having carried out a year long study as part on her final year dissertation. This research proved to be sucessful and in this presentation she will explain how child-centred design was applied to both her own project and the previously mentioned activision interactive soft toys
Lucy Joyner has worked as a Research Associate in Usability Engineering at IC CAVE, University of Abertay Dundee, since June 2000. Lucy's particular research interests are cross-cultural differences in computer game playing and enjoyment, and the roles of motivation and personal needs in play. Information on Lucy's talk will be available soon.
Further details of this and other Scottish UPA events at http://www.scottishupa.org.uk/events.html.