Understanding childdefined gestures and children's mental models for touchscreen tabletop interaction

Creating a predefined set of touchscreen gestures that caters to all users and age groups is difficult. To inform the design of intuitive and easy to use gestures specifically for children, we adapted a userdefined gesture study by Wobbrock et al. [12] that had been designed for adults. We then compared gestures created on an interactive tabletop by 12 children and 14 adults. Our study indicates that previous touchscreen experience strongly influences the gestures created by both groups; that adults and children create similar gestures; and that the adaptations we made allowed us to successfully elicit userdefined gestures from both children and adults. These findings will aid designers in better supporting touchscreen gestures for children, and provide a basis for further userdefined gesture studies with children.