MaSe: create your own mash-up search interface

MaSe provides a sandbox environment for high school students to create their own personalised search interface. It has been designed with two major goals in mind: (1) as a hands-on tutorial for school children, to excite them about programming and computing science through the development of a practical application, and (2) to enable children to design and create their own search interface without extensive programming knowledge or prior experience. Consequently, MaSe provides a way to ascertain what children would like from a search engine interface in an exploratory and creative way as they can create a working prototype. This approach contrasts with previous work on exploring children's requirements of IR systems which attempts to directly elicit user needs through more traditional methods (i.e. surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc). However, we have attempted to incorporate the design guidelines for children as identified by Large (2006) into MaSe, where: we make use of bright colours, large text fonts, spell checking and the use of icons to represent search services, as well as including a thematic experience as suggested by Large (2006), with the use of a puppy avatar and puppy dog footprints.