Nicholas Vanderschantz, University of Waikato, New Zealand
LCR, O’Reilly Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Weds 11 July 12:00
KidsQuestions: Assisting Children’s Digital Information Seeking
Abstract
Children struggle in a variety of ways with the contemporary technologies used in the classroom. Our investigations are aimed at supporting children’s digital information seeking. We hypothesise that an interaction model specifically designed to align with the inquiry-based pedagogies common in education today would be beneficial for children’s digital information search. We conducted a requirements analysis involving children, parents, and teachers, a range of user studies through which we identified the information seeking practices and the issues school children encounter when using contemporary digital information seeking technology. We implemented and explored a search engine interface prototype that was designed to align with the inquiry-based pedagogies that we observed. This presentation gives an overview of our observations and insights gained.