Children using Digital Ink for Writing

This paper describes an empirical study that considered the immediate usability of digital ink with two groups of children. The first group comprised children aged between 5 and 6 and the second group were aged between 8 and 9. The experiment is described together with a discount method for evaluating the readability of digital ink for children. This method is used to derive readability and usability results. These results demonstrate that digital ink provided a good experience for most of the older children but for the younger children, without modification, the technology was not suitable. A discussion of appropriate metrics for the evaluation of text input with recognition based digital ink input is provided and areas for further work are highlighted.