The “kid’s stuff session” was interesting, especially the first two presentations:
- Children Attribute Moral Standing to a Personified Agent; and
- Mischief:: Supporting Remote Teaching in Developing Regions
Great work!
The conclusion of the first article was that children have not developed a stable moral understanding of “avatars”, (computer characters). That is coherent with what I found children designing a device for attending class remotely. Some children designed a hologram, the ultimate remote representation of a person. Although it was evaluated as a great solution to transfer the functionality, it was considered too scary for social interaction. It was too scary, because it could be switched off and on remotely and therefore unexpectedly… new protocols for interacting should be developed to aquire a sense of trust in computer character mediated interaction.
The second article dealt with a design case opposite to mine: in their case the teacher was not available in class, rather than one of the pupils. They experimented with remote, but realtime teaching. Their solution was a multi-mice application, in which each child controlled a mouse, projecting the behaviour of each mouse in front of the class. The absence of the teacher was compensated by the public appearance of each personified mouse and by the sense of monitoring by the teacher. Great idea, great fun to watch their study examples at www.mousemischief.org.