InterestPainter: A Painting Support Tool to Promote Children's Interest in Painting

Painting has many benefits for children. But children's interest in painting may decrease as they grow up, resulting in less participation in painting activities. This paper focuses on using mobile technology to enhance children's interest in painting. Informed by a four-phase model of interest development and our formative research, we proposed three specific design strategies: 1) guiding painting activity with personal preference, 2) drawing attention to visual characteristics, and 3) promoting continued engagement with reward mechanism. We deploy these strategies to InterestPainter, a painting support tool, that allows children to extract outlines and colors of objects by taking pictures. Children can use these elements for painting, and apply an animation effect to their paintings. We conduct our experiment with six children aged 7-11 years. The results indicate that InterestPainter is effective in promoting children's situational interest in painting and offering opportunities to turn the situational interest into individual interest.