Beantable

Beantable is an augmented interactive table supporting young children’s development through the monitored use of smart games

Beantable is an augmented interactive table for children in the age-range of 2 to 7. The purpose of Beantable is to support children’s development through the monitored use of appropriate smart games in an unobtrusive manner. Beantable monitors the children’s interactions and extracts indications of the achieved maturity level and skills by taking into account:

  • The way the child plays
  • The selection of materials and game themes
  • The way the child takes part into the activities

Furthermore, Beantable can act as a diagnostic tool that provides educators and child development experts with extensive data (extracted from the interaction history) that can be used for reasoning about whether the child is meeting all the necessary developmental milestones.

The table, which has been custom made, is a wooden prototype designed and built to be robust and transferrable. The height of the Beantable can be adjusted accordingly to fit children’s’ needs as they grow. All the devices required for the operation of the AmI applications are embedded inside its construction in a way that is invisible to the eye. A main display device is located on the top side of the actual table, and it is enabled with multi-touch and force-pressure sensitive capabilities. The table screen is able to recognize the location and the rotation of physical objects on the top, provided that each physical object carries at least one fiducial marker at its bottom. Games involving physical objects, such as puzzles, were selected as a testing domain. Two jigsaw puzzles (“Winnie the Pooh” and “The Three Little Pigs”), as well as a classic memory game (Pick & Match), were developed and tested with young children.

Installations

Long Term Installations


Temporary Installations

Publications

Zidianakis, E., Stratigi, K., Ioannidi, D., Partarakis, N., Antona, M., & Stephanidis, C. (2016). The farm game: A game designed to follow children’s playing maturity. In the Proceedings of the 5th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity & Game Creation (ArtsIT 2016), Esbjerg, Denmark, 2-3 May.

Ioannidi, D., Zidianakis, E., Antona, M., & Stephanidis, C. (2016). Designing Games for Children with developmental disabilities in Ambient Intelligence Environments. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.

Zidianakis, E., Zidianaki, I., Ioannidi, D., Partarakis, N., Antona, M., Paparoulis, G., & Stephanidis, C. (2015). Employing ambient intelligence technologies to adapt games to children’s playing maturity. In International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 577-589). Springer International Publishing.

Zidianakis, E., Ioannidi, D., Antona, M., & Stephanidis, C. (2015). Modeling and Assessing Young Children Abilities and Development in Ambient Intelligence. In European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (pp. 17-33). Springer International Publishing.

Zidianakis, E., Papagiannakis, G., & Stephanidis, C. (2014). A cross-platform, remotely-controlled mobile avatar simulation framework for AmI environments. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications (p. 12). ACM.

Zidianakis, E., Partarakis, N., Antona, M., & Stephanidis, C. (2014). Building a sensory infrastructure to support interaction and monitoring in ambient intelligence environments. In International Conference on Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions (pp. 519-529). Springer International Publishing.

Zidianakis, E., Antona, M., Paparoulis, G., & Stephanidis, C. (2012). An augmented interactive table supporting preschool children development through playing. In the Proceedings of the 2012 AHFE International Conference (4th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics), San Francisco, California, USA, 21-25 July (pp. 744-753). [CD-ROM]. USA Publishing (ISBN: 978-0-9796435-5-2).