Guidelines for Designing Authoring Tools for Children

Developing a new authoring environment for children is a challenging task. To build the tool, I'm going to base on the lesson learned from existing tools and to incorporate the latest ideas from the research in the child-computer interaction field. A set of guidelines for designing the authoring tools for children, especially for game making is formulated. These guidelines are summarized as follows:

a) Consistency. Ease of use with the help of strong-consistency visual, content-specific metaphors usage and as minimum text as possible.

b) Child-friendliness. Putting together the concept of game design and interface design for children including children’s familiarity, consistency, recoverability, instruction, and age-appropriateness.

c) Degrees of functionality. High-level of instructions corresponding to the things children want to represent in their games including producing games that have been supported by the collection of resources such as pictures, animations, sound and interactivity.

d) Staying in the flow. Providing the leverage and exciting environment for children to explore different domains of knowledge in order to capture their individual interests.

e) Reflection. Indication for children to refine their ideas about the games they are making.

f) Familiar conceptual model. Emphasis on the content-area skills including game design, control design, elements design and game mechanic.

g) Familiar way of programming. Understandable style of scripting and authoring that is appropriate for their task.