ABSTRACT
In designing for children, people tend to assume that kids are creative, intelligent, and capable of great things if they are given good tools and support. This chapter describes how children’s abilities change with age, as it relates to human-computer interaction (HCI); and discusses how children differ from adults cognitively and physically, for those characteristics most relevant for HCI and explains children as participants in the design process. Many examples of software and other cultural artifacts for young children are designed in accordance with adult expectations of what a child should like. Numerous studies confirm that children’s performance with mice and other input devices increases with age. Speech recognition has intriguing potential for a wide-variety of applications for children. Children’s patterns of attention and interaction are quite different from those of adults. Children also bring unique interaction styles to online environments; they respond to information they encounter while browsing the web in markedly different ways than adults.
