How Many Ways Can You Mix Colour? Submitted to Presence Journal Young Children’s Explorations of Mixed Reality Environments

How do we conceptualise and design mixed reality environments (MREs) to support creative play? Here we describe a first pass at a conceptual framework and use it to design a MRE for young children to explore in, focussing on the familiar activity of colour mixing. Different set-ups were provided, where paint or light colours could be mixed, using either physical tools, digital tools or a combination of these. The paper describes how children collaboratively discovered creative ways of using the mixed reality spaces for colour-mixing. We reflect on the success of the framework and our findings for designing effective play in MREs. 1