Children's Health: Evaluating the Impact of Digital Technology. Final Report for Sunderland City Council.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Children’s Health project sponsored by the City of Sunderland Digital Challenge project examined the impact of providing health-focused digital technologies to children aged 11-15 years, in terms of their usage and requirements of such technologies, and their subsequent behavioural changes. The empirical study ran with three groups of six children over a period of seven weeks for each group. A console-based exercise game and an exercise-focused social website were used in the study and the focus was on opportunistic (unstructured/unplanned) exercise. The emergent findings are: • Data collected about physical activity must be more extensive than simple step counts. • Data collection technologies for activities must be ubiquitous but invisible. • Social interaction via technology is expected; positive messages reinforcing attainments of goals are valued; negative feedback is seen as demotivating. • participants were very open to sharing information (privacy was not a concern). • Authority figures have a significant impact on restricting adolescents’ use of technologies. This document reports the how the study was conducted, analyses the findings and draws conclusions from these regarding how to use digital technologies to improve and/or maintain the physical activity levels of children throughout their adolescence and on into adulthood. The appendices provide the detailed (anonymised) data collected during the study and the background literature review

The phone as a tool for combining online and offline social activity – teenagers’ phone access to an online community

We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens do share the use when they want to. The cell phone bridges the online and offline social communities and allows teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community is not only a place for social activity online, it is also a social activity offline that is carried out face-to-face with friends. The cell phone thus was a tool for the teens to combine their participation in the online and the offline world

PeerWise - The Marmite of Veterinary Student Learning

PeerWise is a free online student-centred collaborative learning tool with which students anonymously author, answer, and evaluate multiple choice questions (MCQs). Features such as commenting on questions, rating questions and comments, and appearing on leaderboards, can encourage healthy competition, engage students in reflection and debate, and enhance their communication skills. PeerWise has been used in diverse subject areas but never previously in Veterinary Medicine. The Veterinary undergraduates at the University of Glasgow are a distinct cohort; academically gifted and often highly strategic in their learning due to time pressures and volume of course material. In 2010-11 we introduced PeerWise into 1st year Veterinary Biomolecular Sciences in the Glasgow Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery programme. To scaffold PeerWise use, a short interactive session introduced students to the tool and to the basic principles of good MCQ authorship. Students were asked to author four and answer forty MCQs throughout the academic year. Participation was encouraged by an allocation of up to 5% of the final year mark and inclusion of studentauthored questions in the first summative examination. Our analysis focuses on engagement of the class with the\ud tool and their perceptions of its use. All 141 students in the class engaged with PeerWise and the majority contributed beyond that which was stipulated. Student engagement with PeerWise prior to a summative exam was positively correlated to exam score, yielding a relationship that was highly significant (p<0.001). Student perceptions of PeerWise were predominantly positive with explicit recognition of its value as a learning and revision tool, and more than two thirds of the class in agreement that question authoring and answering reinforced their learning. There was clear polarisation of views, however, and those students who did not like PeerWise were vociferous in their dislike, the biggest criticism being lack of moderation by staff

Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

Designing for frustration and disputes in the family car

This article appears with the express permission of the publisher, IGI Global.Families spend an increasing amount of time in the car carrying out a number of activities including driving to work, caring for children and co-ordinating drop-offs and pickups. While families travelling in cars may face stress from difficult road conditions, they are also likely to be frustrated by coordinating a number of activities and resolving disputes within the confined space of car. A rising number of in-car infotainment and driver-assistance systems aim to help reduce the stress from outside the vehicle and improve the experience of driving but may fail to address sources of stress from within the car. From ethnographic studies of family car journeys, we examine the work of parents in managing multiple stresses while driving, along with the challenges of distractions from media use in the car. Keeping these family extracts as a focus for analysis, we draw out some design considerations that help build on the observations from our empirical work.Microsoft Research and the Dorothy Hodgkin Awar