Eye on Collaborative Creativity : Insights From Multiple-Person Mobile Gaze Tracking in the Context of Collaborative Design

Early Career WorkshopNon peer reviewe

Imaginative play with blended reality characters

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-137).The idea and formative design of a blended reality character, a new class of character able to maintain visual and kinetic continuity between the fully physical and fully virtual; the technical underpinnings of its unique blended physical and digital play context and the evaluation of its impact on children's play are the contents of this thesis. A play test study with thirty-four children aged three and a half to seven was conducted using non-reactive, unobtrusive observational methods and a validated evaluation instrument. Our claim is that young children have accepted the idea, persistence and continuity of blended reality characters. Furthermore, we found that children are more deeply engaged with blended reality characters and are more fully immersed in blended reality play as co-protagonists in the experience, in comparison to interactions with strictly screen-based representations. As substantiated through the use of quantitative and qualitative analysis of drawings and verbal utterances, the study showed that young children produce longer, detailed and more imaginative descriptions of their experiences following blended reality play. The desire to continue engaging in blended reality play as expressed by children's verbal requests to revisit and extend their play time with the character positively affirms the potential for the development of an informal learning platform with sustained appeal to young children.by David Yann Robert.S.M

Research and Creative Activity, July 01, 2021-June 30, 2022: Major Sponsored Programs and Faculty Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Foreword by Bob Wilhelm, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development: This booklet highlights successes in research, scholarship and creative activity by University of Nebraska–Lincoln faculty during the fiscal year running July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022. It lists investigators, project titles and funding sources on major grants and sponsored awards that were active during the year; fellowships and other recognitions and honors bestowed on our faculty; books, chapters and creative literature published by faculty; performances, exhibitions and other examples of creative activity; patents and licensing agreements; and conference presentations. In recognition of the important role faculty play in the undergraduate experience at Nebraska, this booklet notes the students and mentors participating in the Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experience (UCARE) and the First-Year Research Experience (FYRE) programs. Increasing impact through research and creative activity is one of the six core aims of the N2025 strategic plan. A few measurements of progress made this year: • UNL achieved a record $321 million in total research expenditures in FY 2021, a 31• Our faculty earned 1,560 sponsored research awards in FY 2021. N2025 aims also include contributing to economic growth throughout the state and broadening Nebraska’s engagement in community, industry and global partnerships. These are some measures of our efforts to commercialize university-sponsored research and partner with industry: • Nebraska Innovation Campus created 2,127 jobs statewide. The cumulative impact of NIC investments totals$328.9 million. • Industry sponsorship supported $19.8 million in research expenditures. • NUtech Ventures brought in$6.36 million in licensing income. I want to thank the Nebraska Research community for its willingness to collaborate, mentor and redefine success in research and creative activity. Your leadership is paving the way for future growth and providing an unparalleled educational experience. At Nebraska, it is the people who make the place. Because of your dedication and expertise, Nebraska is positioned to solve some of the world’s most wicked problems. I am impressed by your commitment to the Grand Challenges initiative, a strategic investment of up to $40 million over four years for projects in the high-impact areas of anti-racism and racial equity; climate resilience; early childhood education and development; health equity; quantum science and engineering; science and technology literacy for society; and sustainable food and water security. More than 180 faculty, staff and students are contributing to projects funded in Year 1. Another N2025 aim is to create a climate that emphasizes, prioritizes and expands inclusive excellence and diversity. In the Office of Research and Economic Development, we continue to seek ways to remove barriers to success and ensure all Nebraska researchers have the resources they need to thrive. Thank you for the feedback you’ve thoughtfully provided. I am pleased to present this record of accomplishments. Contents Awards of$5 Million or More Awards of $1 Million to$4,999,999 Awards of $250,000 to$999,999 Early Career Awards Arts and Humanities Awards of $250,000 or More Arts and Humanities Awards of$50,000 to $249,999 Arts and Humanities Awards of$5,000 to $49,999 Patents License Agreements National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Teams Creative Activity Books Recognitions and Honors Journal Articles Conference Presentations UCARE and FYRE Projects Glossar

Promoting Andean children's learning of science through cultural and digital tools

Conference Theme: To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time, and scaleIn Peru, there is a large achievement gap in rural schools. In order to overcome this problem, the study aims to design environments that enhance science learning through the integration of ICT with cultural artifacts, respecting the Andean culture and empower rural children to pursue lifelong learning. This investigation employs the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework, and the Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology using an iterative process of design, implementation and evaluation of the innovative practice.published_or_final_versio

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe