cfp special journal issue on 'Tangibles for Children'

Introduction - Call for journal papers - Organizers - Workshop program & participants

Special issue in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Editors: Bieke Zaman, Vero Vanden Abeele, Panos Markopoulos and Paul Marshall

A special issue on the workshop's topic is organized in the journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, published by Springer London.

This is an open call for journal papers (thus not only for the workshop participants).

EXTENDED DEADLINE for full submissions: Sunday, 11th October 2009!

Synopsis

In recent years, research on tangible interaction has grown steadily. A significant proportion of this work involves children and aims to offer benefits related to ease of use and overall user experience, while also supporting learning and developmental processes. However, research on tangible interaction lacks solid evidence to support the assumed positive effects.
This call for papers for a special issue is associated with a workshop that is held at CHI 2009 on the same topic. It will focus on the challenges of, and opportunities for designing and evaluating likeable, useable and/or educational tangibles with and for children. It will bring together research on tangibles, design and evaluation methods with children and the benefits and costs of tangible interaction.

1. Our goal is to foster a critical attitude to the theoretical underpinnings, design and evaluation of tangible interfaces for children. We welcome attempts to introduce rigourous contributions to this debate and aim to collect exemplary cases of evaluations of tangible interfaces, as well as studies that shed light on methodologies for evaluating tangible interfaces with children.

More particularly, topics of interest to this special issue include (but are not limited to):

1. Learning, usability and other benefits of tangibility
2. Theory on (methods for) tangible interfaces
3. Potential novel or enhanced interaction techniques that relate to better user experiences for the users of tangible interfaces
4. Empirical evidence for the assumed benefits (and costs) of tangibility
5. Techniques for designing tangibles that are adapted to children’s needs and capabilities
6. Appropriate evaluation methods for assessing the benefits of tangibles with children
7. Theoretical considerations on how the field of tangibility might evolve

Submission details

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other official publications such as journals or conference papers. Submissions should be between 6000 and 8000 words and authors are encouraged to use the Springer guidelines for authors, available at ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/Word/journals and use the Springer reference style.

Submissions should be sent via the Easychair submission website.

Dates

11th October 2009	Full submission due (Extended deadline!)
15th November 2009:	First Notification (extended)
21st December 2009:	Revisions due (extended)
25th January 2010:	Final Notification (extended)
June – Dec 2010:	Publication

last update: 10th September 2009