VIDEO PUZZLE: A VISUOSPATIAL BASED TOOL TO EVALUATE CHILD-MULTITOUCH INTERACTION ACCURACY

: We are now living in an ecosystem surrounding by interactive surface technology with its highly complex contents and applications. Pre-school children in Malaysia also face the same challenge in dealing with their edutainment which mainly resides on the multi-touch screen.  This happened even more obvious when children playing game on multi-touch screen, gestures and objects are flashing fast from multiple angel within the screen, and children are moving their figure fast to ensure that that they can perform their task accurately.  In this study, video puzzle had been employed as a metrics of evaluation to verify the level of accuracy at acquiring onscreen interactive and unstructured video puzzle pieces by pre-school children. Video puzzle is used to simulate the highly interactive, complexity, redundancies and repetitive child-computer interaction in today environment.  The interactiveness, complexity, redundancy and repetitiveness in the interaction with video puzzle could be a significant challenge to pre-school children. Therefore, it’s an urgent call for us to understand the factors affecting the visuospatial skills and touch accuracy in child-computer interaction. The observation found that pre-school children tend to synthesis, evaluate and solve the unstructured video puzzle at their own efforts and this practice lay a foundation for children to become an effective problem solver in real world uncertain yet complex situation. In addition, this study also confirmed that the main reasons of missed numbers are due to the association of the pre-school children visuospatial motor’s abilities, size of the video puzzle piece and the complexity of the interaction. The touch accuracy on multi-touch surface for video puzzle is not really determined by age but size of the video puzzle and complexity does matter. The test indicated that less complexity with bigger size video puzzle leads to better touch accuracy on multi-touch screen. When the video puzzle testing moves into size 4 x 4, whereby the video puzzle piece size become smaller, the complexity and repetitiveness of interaction increased accordingly, pre-school children started to have difficulty to accurately tab on the piece of video puzzle.