Prototyping products using web-based AI tools: designing a tangible programming environment with children

Abstract

A wide variety of children's products such as mobile apps, toys, and assistant systems now have integrated smart features. Designing such AI-powered products with children, the users, is essential. Using high-fidelity prototypes can be a means to reveal children's needs and behaviors with AI-powered systems. Yet, a prototype that can show unpredictable features similar to the final AI-powered product can be expensive. A more manageable and inexpensive solution is using web-based AI prototyping tools such as Teachable Machine. In this work, we developed a Teachable Machine-powered game-development environment to inform our tangible programming environment's design decisions. Using this kind of an AI-powered high-fidelity prototype in the research process allowed us to observe children in a very similar setting to our final AI-powered product and extract design considerations. This paper reports our experience of prototyping AI-powered solutions with children and shares our design considerations for children's self-made tangible representations.