AboutAbout this activity
Drawing, with the click taken out of it.
Every other way of drawing on a computer is a drag: put the pen down, move it, lift it. A person using an eye-gaze camera has the middle part and neither of the other two. So this activity takes the drag out. Wherever the pointer — or the gaze — goes on the paper, a line follows it, straight away, with nothing to press and nothing to hold down.
There are two sheets. Colour pens gives you nine colours, three brush widths and a choice of black or white paper, and whatever gets made is made from nothing. The rainbow scratch card is the foil card from every craft drawer: a black coating over a rainbow, and looking at it scrapes the coating away. Nothing has to be chosen and nothing can be got wrong, which makes it the better first sheet for a player who is still working out that where they look is doing something at all.
A single switch gets a real turn rather than a consolation one. With no pointer to follow, the brush travels a looping path of its own and the big button decides whether it is leaving a trail behind it. The path repeats, on purpose — a player whose whole contribution is the timing of one press has to be able to predict where the brush is going next.
Two accommodations are doing quiet work underneath. Gaze data arrives as a tremor of a few pixels even when someone is looking steadily, so the brush is smoothed — it costs a little responsiveness and buys a line that looks deliberate. And eyes do not pan, they flick: a jump across the paper is treated as the pen lifting rather than as a line to draw, so glancing at the buttons never rules a stripe through work that is already done.
Nothing is timed, nothing is scored, and there is no way to lose. Dwell time, target size, scan speed and spoken feedback all live in the app's Settings panel and can be saved per player on the device.