Wizard of Oz Evaluations with Children - Deception and Discovery

This paper describes a small study that investigated how children perceived a Wizard of Oz experiment. Ten high school children attended two different presentations of Wizard of Oz evaluations and once they had experienced both, they were told about the wizard set up and asked some questions about their perceptions of what was happening. The results showed that for the majority of the children, the presence of the wizard went unnoticed even when the wizard was in the room. Those that noticed wizard activity were alerted to it by the sound of the keyboard activity that accompanied one of the experimental setups. This is an important result for the child computer research community, but further work needs to look at effects on different age groups and with different use contexts.