Towards understanding of play with augmented toys

Abstract

This work is directed towards understanding how the transformation of a regular object/traditional toy into an augmented toy may affect the dynamics of play behavior. We present an observational user study with 8 children from kindergarten to understand the play value of SparKubes. SparKubes are stand-alone tangible objects that accept light from one direction and pass it on in another direction. We found that children who were aware of the SparKubes' interactivity features displayed more variety of patterns and showed greater interaction with SparKubes as compared to the control group who were not aware of the features. The play behaviour revealed that SparKubes have constructive play value on the play pyramid and that adding light features changed the patterns of constructions by children. This knowledge opens up an exciting area of research in technology-mediated play and designing augmented toys for children.