Swinxsbee: A shared interactive play object to stimulate children's social play behaviour and physical exercise

Abstract

This paper describes a study on the influence of personal and shared play objects on the amount of social interaction. The study makes use of Swinxs, a commercially available game console that uses the strength of digital games to facilitate physically active games that can be played indoor or outdoor. A Frisbee-like object called Swinxsbee has been designed to support new game possibilities for Swinxs and stimulate social interaction. The results of a user evaluation show that children playing with shared objects engage in more social interaction than children playing with personal objects. Furthermore we observed that when games require much physical activity, this might have a negative influence on the level of social interaction, while games demanding creativity might have a positive influence. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009.