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Abstract
Outdoor play is an important activity in young children's lives which should be encouraged. Cultural and social demographic data inform of decreasing numbers of children and shortage of playgrounds around urban areas. Technological advancements such as television and computer games have influenced children's recreational activities so that they prefer to play indoors rather than outdoors. In order to motivate children to play outside we propose a technologically supported play tool titled ‘SoundTag’. This is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based wearable system that uses interactive sound feedback. ‘SoundTag’ is designed especially for preschool children. In this paper, we detail the concept of the system and related design theory. A pilot experiment is reported where we observed the system in use. Evaluation was of playfulness of the system as well as its impact on improving children's physical activity.
Acknowledgement
We appreciate the help of Ms Tomomi Sato who arranged the pilot experiment as well as Yui, Shin, Yuttan, Kou, Mocchi, Hina and Rei who fully enjoyed the play. We are grateful to all the attendees of the first international symposium on Ludic Engagement Designs for All (LEDA) held in Denmark on November 28th to 30th 2007 for a lot of valuable comments. We are also grateful to Dr Sue Cobb at the University of Nottingham for the voluntary help of improving the English manuscript of the paper, listed on LEDA.