ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the study of user-tablet communication and identifies several factors key to understanding. It finds that touch and visual information are the primary channels of user-tablet utterances, and that the amount of information transmitted by the other channels is small in comparison as to render them practically irrelevant to the study of user-tablet communication in an educational context. One recent set of guidelines for developing educational applications for children recommends keeping audio cues to an absolute minimum due to the noisy classroom environment. The design principle called visibility means the system should keep users informed about what is going on in the interaction; this is connected closely to what we call communication from the device to the user. Eleanor and James Gibson's ecological theory of perception and theory of perceptual learning serve as the basis from which to build such an understanding. Their theories propose that perception is a product of both human capacity and an object's properties/affordances.
