Selection of touch gestures for children's applications

Abstract

The touch-screen revolution is not restricted to adults only. Parents find games and educational applications running on touch-screen devices and purchase them for their children. Therefore, very young children are playing with and exploring these touch-screen devices. For any one device there can be hundreds of applications for the parents to choose from, so it is likely that the selection of applications is based on advertisements and recommendations. There is a large range of gestures available on multi-touch devices and there is very little known about the relationship between the age of a child and the gestures that they can master. This research focuses on the iPad device and children aged between 2 to 4 years old and investigate which gestures the children in that age group can manage. The results of the research, therefore, could be used to form guidelines for the design of gesture-based software for very young children.