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StretchyStars: a multitouch elastic display to support cooperative play among preschoolers

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Abstract

Cooperative play begins in preschool and teaches preschoolers to be more tolerant, focused, and respectful of others. However, preschoolers find difficult to learn how to work together. Nowadays, there are cooperative interactive surfaces for children that focus on improving their creativity and socialization skills. However, there have been few studies on the use of interactive surfaces to promote cooperative play among preschoolers and less research exploring issues around the deployment of cooperative elastic displays. In this paper, we present the development of StretchyStars, an elastic display encouraging the cooperative play by enabling preschoolers to play sounds when touching, tapping, or pinching a spandex fabric encouraging the cooperative play. To play with StretchyStars, preschoolers wear a glove with a color lamp to infer the identity of the child interacting with the fabric. A 3-week deployment study, with 30 preschoolers and 4 teachers, shows preschoolers were willing to help each other and work on strategies. Moreover, StretchyStars was perceived as a fun and entertaining game, but educational enough to be used as teaching material inside the classroom of preschoolers. We close discussing lessons learned and directions for future work.

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Notes

  1. Children from 3 to 5 years old

  2. Shader: https://www.opengl.org/wiki/Shader, https://khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/index_gl.php

  3. JavaSound: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/sound/

  4. OpenCV: http://opencv.org/

  5. Lux. is the SI unit of illuminance and luminous emittance. We measured the Lux with the Android app “LightMeter.”

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Acknowledgments

We thank all the participants enrolled in this study. We thank CONACYT for students’ fellowships.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada (CICESE), Ensenada, Mexico

    Vianey Vazquez, Franceli L. Cibrian & Monica Tentori

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  1. Vianey Vazquez
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  2. Franceli L. Cibrian
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  3. Monica Tentori
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Correspondence to Monica Tentori.

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Vazquez, V., Cibrian, F.L. & Tentori, M. StretchyStars: a multitouch elastic display to support cooperative play among preschoolers. Pers Ubiquit Comput 23, 99–115 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-018-1179-5

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