Thursday, December 09, 2004

Media Equation for Children

The media equation as my colleague has explained below is the way people respond to media in a fundamentally social manner and how they treat computers as social actors in interactions.

However, I will now consider how this affects children in particular. The background to the media equation is that due to our minds not having evolved fast enough to deal with these new concepts, is this true also of children that they react in the same way as adults in dealing with computer interfaces as social actors?

From my research, I have found many interesting findings. The first interesting finding was that children seemed to respond in the same manner regardless of the personality of the computer. Whether the computer praised them for their performance or not they reacted in the same manner. This has some important implications for the design of an interface as it means that it is not as important for it to be as positive as was previously thought. However, this does not mean that it is worthless being positive as the findings did show a very slight level of increase in the level of answers given. On the whole, children’s software currently is presented in a very positive manner regardless of whether the child gets the answer right or wrong. However, from the findings it can be seen that adults seem to be more affected by these things than children do.

However, one significant area that children are more affected by the media equation than adults is where the computer comes across as a team mate. Where the computer made suggestions the children were far more likely to follow the advice and make changes to their answers. Although the finding were not statistically significant they were found to be much more than the way adults responded.

Furthermore, boys were found to be far more influenced than girls in the suggestions the computer made when investigating the effects of team formation.

The implications of these findings are that when designing interfaces for children, they must be set apart from those of adults. Aside from the usual brighter colours and rounded graphics, it is perhaps far more important to design the interface in a friend like manner where the computer takes the child through the software/site/application just as a parent or teacher would in real life.

Moreover, with children, due to the fact that they are usually in the stage of learning and experimentation, then they adapt much quicker to a personality than adults do. Therefore, more care must be taken with design of the way information is sequenced rather than they personality of the computer. Furthermore, presentation is far more important in terms of colour and style as children react more positively to a brighter and more interactive display.

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