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One of the superpowers that children posses is the power of imagination. Imagination can be said to be a tool that aids in cognitive development and intellectual thinking. Imagination comes to the foreground when children play with their toys. Its often ...

Legoons is a ready-to-play inflatable construction kit that enables children, 6 to 12 year old, to construct characters and artifacts that can be actuated by pumping air. Our set features three types of silicone bricks with distinct behaviors when ...

Playing with food is both a common taboo and a secret desire. From a young age children are taught not to play with their food but are fed in playful ways ("here comes the aeroplane"). The food we consume be it a fruit picked from a tree or an elaborate ...

This paper explores Research through Design (RtD) as a potential methodology for developing new interactive experiences for animals. We present an example study from an on-going project and examine whether RtD offers an appropriate framework for ...

The paper presents Polipo, a tangible toy created for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD). Designed in collaboration with therapists, and tested with six children for five weeks, Polipo offers various opportunities for tangible interaction ...

Personal Informatics technologies and the quantified-self movement focus on helping people collect personally meaningful information to gain self-knowledge, which can go hand in hand with the drive to change behavior or improve oneself. The field of ...

"Meet the Frumbles" is a group of felt robotic characters that talk amongst themselves and interact with the audience. Empathy, cuteness and gags are explored as communicational facilitators and ludic interaction between a felt robot creature's ...

Sensory Triptych is a set of exploratory, interactive sensors designed for children that invite "new ways of seeing" our world from the perspective of the here (the earth, air, and water around us), near (things just out of sight), and out there (...

This paper presents an evaluation of the effectiveness of a new sociallyassistive robot, Auti, in encouraging physical and verbal interactions in children with autism. It aims to encourage positive play behaviors such as gentle speaking and touching, ...

In this article we examine playful hybrid products located in the intersection of toys and games. By hybrid, we mean games and toys that utilize digital environments to provide added value to tactile, physical or material experiences. The paper aims to ...

Blockuits is an exploration in the design of construction sets for children, resulting in three prototypes. All prototypes have simple interfaces, interactions and electronic outputs. These interactive toys foster creativity and artistic expression ...

In this paper we propose The Play Grid, a model for systemizing different play types. The approach is psychological by nature and the actual Play Grid is based, therefore, on two pairs of fundamental and widely acknowledged distinguishing ...

This paper presents "ToyVision", a software toolkit aimed to make easy the prototyping of tangible games in visual based tabletop devices. The architecture of ToyVision incorporates a new abstraction layer, the Widget layer. This layer is the ...

We present a new set of toys and games especially designed to bring tabletop interaction closer to very young children. The use of these toys will be shown in an especially designed tabletop device adapted to children aged between 3 to 6 years old. ...

We introduce the Tangible Video Bubbles, a new video-based drawing space for children to create expressive video art. A Tangible Video Bubble acts both as a container for children's expressions, as well as an instrument with which children can perform ...

We introduce Tangible Message Bubbles, a new composition and communication tool that invites youngsters to express and record their everyday expressions, play with these original recordings, and share these personal creations with their friends and ...

Graphs are a versatile representation of many systems in computer science, the social sciences, and mathematics, but graph theory is not taught in schools. We present our work on Graphmaster, a computationally enhanced construction kit that enables ...

We describe Posey, a computationally-enhanced hub-and-strut construction kit for learning and play. Posey employs a ball and socket connection that allows users to move the parts of an assembled model. Hubs and struts are optocoupled through the ball ...

Design is fundamental. In various forms, it permeates engineering, management, architecture and the arts. Design aptitude separates the visionary from the technician. Although many skills, like math or technical writing, are straightforward to quantify ...

This poster describes the design and early evaluation of MusicPets. MusicPets allows children to store audio, such as (composed) tunes or recorded messages, on tangible containers embodied by soft toys. Results show that children enjoy creating tunes ...