MR.Brick: Designing A Remote Mixed-reality Educational Game System for Promoting Children's Social & Collaborative Skills

TL;DR

MR.Brick is a mixed reality educational game system designed to enhance children's remote social and collaborative skills, outperforming traditional video games in fostering effective remote collaboration.

Contribution

This paper introduces MR.Brick, a novel mixed reality system specifically designed for remote collaboration among children, filling a gap in existing educational tools.

Findings

MR.Brick improves children's remote collaboration skills.

Children exhibit more positive social behaviors with MR.Brick.

The system outperforms traditional video games in fostering collaboration.

Abstract

Children are one of the groups most influenced by COVID-19-related social distancing, and a lack of contact with peers can limit their opportunities to develop social and collaborative skills. However, remote socialization and collaboration as an alternative approach is still a great challenge for children. This paper presents MR.Brick, a Mixed Reality (MR) educational game system that helps children adapt to remote collaboration. A controlled experimental study involving 24 children aged six to ten was conducted to compare MR.Brick with the traditional video game by measuring their social and collaborative skills and analyzing their multi-modal playing behaviours. The results showed that MR.Brick was more conducive to children's remote collaboration experience than the traditional video game. Given the lack of training systems designed for children to collaborate remotely, this study may inspire interaction design and educational research in related fields.