Children’s Video Puzzle Interaction: The Effects of Age, Experience, Object Size, Screen Size and Task-Fit

The size of an object and screen is of critical importance for children to interact successfully with video puzzles. Therefore, it is an urgent call for us to understand the factors affecting the object’s size, screen size and task-fit with actual interaction experience with a video puzzle, in a child-computer interaction. This study aimed to fill this gap by investigating the determinants of the actual usage experience of video puzzle and its moderators, namely through age and experience. This paper examined the moderating roles of age and experience in the relationship between the determinants (object size, screen size and task-fit) and the actual usage of video puzzle experience (N = 195, 3–6 years). A linear regression was conducted to understand the moderating role of the moderators. The results showed that the actual interaction experience with a video puzzle was determined by task-fit, moderated by age and experience. Besides, the result also revealed that the role of the object’s size with the actual interaction experience with a video puzzle was moderated by experience. From the results, no moderating effect was found between the screen’s size and the actual interaction experience with a video puzzle for both age and experience. This finding indicated that in today’s child-computer interaction, the size of the screen is no longer an important factor to consider, regardless of age and experience. Furthermore, the result has shown that there is a moderating effect by experience between the object’s size and the actual interaction experience with the video puzzle. The result has suggested that the experience is crucially important in effecting pre-school children’s actual interaction experience with a video puzzle. Concerning the complexity of interaction, pre-school children were having difficulties to accurately tab on the target of interaction during their interaction with a video puzzle through the use of a multi-touch screen, but with more interaction experience, the accuracy of targeting was increased accordingly