Playing Out with IoT

现在在外面玩的孩子越来越少了。户外活动的减少引起了人们对健康、福祉和发展的一系列担忧，国际社会也不断呼吁采取行动解决这一问题。玩耍减少的原因包括父母越来越不愿意让孩子在外面无人看管，因为他们担心社区的安全，特别是交通堵塞和“陌生人”的增加。随着在户外玩耍的儿童越来越少，社区、城镇和城市正在成为“游戏沙漠”，在那里既没有正式的也没有非正式的户外玩耍机会，在那里玩耍根本不受欢迎。孩子们在外面玩的越来越少，在网上玩的却越来越多。90岁以下的人使用互联网搜索信息、社交和玩游戏。但是，虽然人们很容易理解，9岁以下的人在网上消费的内容越来越多，但他们仍然很少有机会创造和分享自己关于生活的数字内容。更糟糕的是，人们广泛关注视频媒体，通过YouTube和Vine等社交媒体平台分享体验。在这些平台上，家长和社会对儿童的互联网安全有许多担忧，而YouTube Kids等正规服务则强调儿童是内容消费者，而不是生产者。我们通过研究物联网（IoT）技术的机会来应对这些现实世界中相互关联的问题，使孩子们能够将他们的社区转变为数字增强的游乐场和冒险场所。物联网指的是我们环境中的物体可以不断地与环境和互联网连接，以提供新的服务。我们认为物联网是一种全新的数字内容模式，儿童（或任何人）都可以创造和分享。例如，我们想象物联网技术如何支撑孩子的游戏——例如，一个孩子可以创建一个物联网来增加墙上的砖块，为她的足球练习提供暂时的目标——以及提供记录和分享游戏的替代模式——例如，一个孩子可以分享她的足球练习的媒体，她的游戏的元数据可以用来编程另一个孩子的物联网来测试和比较他们自己的技能。我们建议，通过创造新的游戏机会，利用儿童的兴趣和数字和社会技术，我们可以激励孩子们更多地出去玩。为了促进这种互动，我们需要了解和测试孩子们需要什么样的支持来建立他们自己的物联网，以及孩子们如何围绕这些内容进行协商和创造故事，他们可以安全地分享。我们认为利用物联网感知和收集的关于孩子玩耍的数据可能是一种有趣的方式，既可以记录孩子的游戏体验，又可以保持孩子的匿名性，并帮助他们与其他人分享游戏体验。该项目将开展一项以行动为导向的“野外”研究计划，直接与梅多韦尔的雪松基金会、艾尔舍姆的BeChange、布里斯托尔的Playing Out CIC和SAMLabs合作。我们将共同设计和开发技术，支持9岁以下儿童创造数字增强户外游戏。我们将使用参与式设计方法来实现这一目标，与两个社区的9岁以下儿童密切合作，设计工具和它们所促进的游戏类型。我们很想知道我们的“玩耍”物联网是否会改变孩子的游戏行为，改变孩子与邻居的关系，影响社区中的游戏机会，或者改善亲子互动。为了帮助我们了解我们的技术的影响，我们将在两个地点进行观察、访谈和问卷调查。我们还将对所创作的戏剧种类进行内容分析。

Fewer and fewer children now play outside. This reduction in outdoor active play - or 'playing-out' - has led to a whole range of concerns around health, wellbeing and development as well as continued international calls-to-action to address the issue. Factors behind reductions in playing-out include an increased reluctance of parents to allow children to be unsupervised outside due to concerns about the safety of their neighbourhoods, and in particular, increasing traffic and 'strangers'. As fewer children play outside, neighbourhoods, towns and cities are becoming 'play deserts', places where there are neither formal nor informal opportunities for outdoor play, and where play is simply not welcome anymore. While children play outside less and less, children play online more and more. The under 9s use the internet to search for information, to socialize and to play games. But, while the under 9s are readily understood to consume increasing amounts of content online, they continue to have little opportunity to create and share their own digital content about their lives. This is made worse by an extensive focus on video media for sharing experiences using social media platforms such as YouTube and Vine, where parents and society share many concerns around children's internet safety, and where formal services such as YouTube Kids emphasizes the child as a content consumer, rather than producer.We respond to these real-world interrelated problems by investigating the opportunity for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to enable children to transform their neighbourhoods into digitally enhanced playgrounds and adventures. IoT refers to the idea that objects within our environments can be continually connected with the environment and the internet to offer new kinds of services. We think about IoTs as an entirely new mode of digital content that children (or anyone) can create and share. We imagine, for example, how IoT technologies can scaffold a child's play - e.g. a child can create an IoT to augment bricks in a wall to provide temporal targets for her football practice - as well as provide alternative modes to document and share play - e.g. a child can share media of her football practice, and her play's meta-data can be used to program another child's IoT to test and compare their own skills. We propose that by creating new opportunities for play which draw on children's interests and use in digital and social technologies that we can motivate children to play out more. In order to facilitate these kinds of interactions we need to understand and test the kind of support children would need to set-up their own IoTs for playing out, as well as how children would negotiate and create stories around this content which they could safely share. We think making use of the data sensed and collected about a child's play with IoTs could be an interesting way to both record the experience of a child's play while preserving a child's anonymity, and help them share that play with others to try out. This project will pursue an action orientated 'in the wild' program of research, working directly with the Cedarwood Trust in Meadow Well, BeChange in Aylesham, Playing Out CIC in Bristol and SAMLabs. Together we will co-design and develop technologies which support the under 9s in creating digitally-augmented outside play. We will use participatory design methods to achieve this, working closely with under 9s in both communities to design the tools and the kinds of play they facilitate. We are keen to know whether our 'Playing Out' IoT changes children's play behaviours, changes a child's relationship with their neighbourhood, impacts on the play opportunities in a community, or improves parent-child interactions. To help us understand the impact of our technology we will undertake observations, interviews and questionnaire surveys in both locations. We will also undertake a content analysis of the kinds of play created.