Improving Relationships between Parents and Children in Shopping Malls by Using a Digital Treasure Hunting Game

According to our survey, 85% of parents find it difficult to shop with their children in shopping malls. We think that the children's lack of purpose makes them bored and do things that irritate their parents. Such behavior worsens the parent-children relationship during shopping. We propose a treasure hunting game to give children a particular purpose, named tekuPico. We designed and implemented the game and then conducted a field study to verify its effectiveness. Results show the game could improve the relationship between parents and children, however, it also showed two shortcomings in our game design: S1: parents do not have enough shopping time, and S2: tekuPico cannot guarantee guiding children to the shops to which their parents want to go. To resolve these, we redesigned tekuPico introducing a new "key-bar zones system".