Jean Piaget Research

Jean Piaget was a very important and influential person in this field during the 20th century. His views on how children learn made a huge impact on interaction design and children.

Piaget believed that children's learning occurs through different stages. Adaption is when children learn through adapting to the environment, in this stage children can experience the world and interact with it thus learning. Seymour Papert, another key figure in this field, developed Piaget's initial idea of this with constructionism. The idea of constructionism is that

Piaget also believed that maturation, experience, and emotions were major contributing factors to learning and each of these factors, as well as the factors mentioned above, all had a direct impact on how technology should be designed for children.

With maturation for example, it is necessary to understand the level of maturity of the age group that the design process is being carried out for and what children of that level of maturity and age can accomplish.

Experience is also an important aspect of this because Technologies can provide unique experiences through simulations and virtual reality. This cannot be done, however, without a very high standard of design. Through technologies that have been designed specifically to simulate, children can discover passions about themselves and unleash powerful ideas.

Finally, Piaget also believed that emotions had a great effect on a child's learning experience. In this way, technologies for children must be designed so that they can begin to feel an emotional connection with characters or storyline by making them relate to their own lives. Computers and other software have a great flexibility in this area which makes them the perfe...

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...l for getting a competitive edge on similar products.

It is also highly beneficial to use children as informants. This role allows children to share ideas and opinions with the design team acting as consultants during the product development and design process. This role enables children to contribute their ideas to the design process through interviews, questionnaires and focus groups which could prove invaluable in terms of design. This means that design ideas come from the collaboration of adults and children.

The advantage of children joining as design partners is that they will administer more input into the design process which is likely to result in technologies that better address their needs, interests, and abilities. This is why children are an extremely useful resource when it comes to designing applications and other such products aimed at them. 285