Family Member Learning Mobile Application on Android Platform

From generation to generation, the issue of politeness and respectful decrease in the society has been getting serious. This problem is discovered to be caused by lack of exposure to family titles at a young age, inconsistent naming in different languages and uninteresting teaching and learning approaches demotivate learners. This project aims to develop an Android app in English and Malay to motivate and nurture family titles learning in children of age one to three with the supervision of their parents, thus creating a better society with respects. Eclipse SDK is used in developing the Android app prototype and tested with a smart phone of Samsung Galaxy Note 5.3 inch. Positive results are received from the conducted user perception study and System Usability Scale (SUS) study which shoes that users (parents) are satisfied with the app prototype in improving their child’s learning towards family titles and relationships learning

Design and Development of Hilogocical Prototypes for Mobile Collaborative Learning (MCL)

© ASEE 2011Collaborative learning is becoming more attentive approach within all educational environments. With new emerging technologies on mobile devices, collaborative learning has grown in popularity to be able to boost the pedagogical learning model in nomadic environments. This paper describes theoretical and technical foundations for designing and developing an effective Mobile collaborative learning (MCL) environment. The focus of this paper is to suggest the client and server based prototypes with support of functional components and working procedures, which help the user to get contents from server to meet the pedagogical needs. We have also proposed novel concept of integrating the features of content-server with cache-server, which helps the users to obtain the fast contents for MCL process. Our proposed prototypes will provide best MCL environment particularly for those students who do not want to attend the institutions but want to learn at homes and working places through mobiles. Finally, we propose new application named "group" with complete prototype design and development to facilitate the students for obtaining the contents for collaboration. Some valuable recommendations are also suggested to incorporate with "group” in Android operating system (OS) and we also implement some part of group application

DemYouth: Co-Designing and Enacting Tools to Support Young People’s Engagement with People with Dementia

There is a growing body of research examining the role of technology in supporting the care of—and relationships surrounding—people with dementia, yet little attention has been given to how this relates to younger family members. We conducted a qualitative study based on a series of 6 codesign workshops conducted with 14 young people who had personal experience with dementia. Initially, our workshops focused on understanding the difficulties that young people face when engaging, interacting and being with people with dementia. Initial analysis of workshop data informed the design of three digital tool concepts that were used as the basis for user enactment workshops. Our findings highlight the young people's desire to be more involved in their family discussions around dementia and a need for them to find new ways to connect with their loved ones with dementia. We offer a set of design considerations for future systems that support these needs and reflect on some of the complexities we faced around engaging young people in this difficult topic of discussion

Garis panduan pembangunan media pengajaran berkonsepkan penceritaan digital untuk tablet skrin sentuh

The usage of the Digital Storytelling (DST) concept for development process in instructional media is not fully comprehended. Besides, the features of DST tools also need to be identified. The lack of standard guidelines to develop instructional media with touch screen interaction should also be addressed. Therefore, this study proposes a guideline for the development of instructional media with DST concept (MPBPD) for touch screen tablet that could help designers to produce compelling MPBPD apps. This study applies the Design Science Methodology to achieve the objectives of the study that comprises of five phases: problem awareness, suggestion, development, evaluation and conclusion. A total of 13 experts and 70 teachers from the Institut Pendidikan Guru (IPG) and a school in the Northern Region, Malaysia participated in the quality evaluation phase using a set of questionnaire called Q-Qguide. Furthermore, 40 MPBPD apps created by the respondents were measured in terms of compellingness using a rubric instrument (R-Compelling). The findings indicate that the guideline is of quality and has positive and high relationship in the dimension of usefulness, ease of use, easy to understand, applicability and tablet interaction. MPBPD apps which were developed by implementing the guideline is found to meet the guideline elements and has a high perceived compellingness level. In conclusion, the study has contributed a guideline for the development of instructional media with DST concept for touch screen table

FollowThem: aplicação móvel para monitorizar crianças e idosos

Currently, there is a growing interest in developing mobile applications in an attempt to overcome loneliness, especially on the senior age group. This interest also extends to children monitoring. In this context, a mobile application developed for the Android operating system, designated FollowThem, is presented. Besides the mobile application, two other components were developed: a caregiver area and an information area. This mobile application is designed to monitor and assist elderly and children, in order to allow them to feel safer, while simultaneously providing support to their caregivers. FollowThem has an intuitive interface and offers useful features to their users, such as detecting their geographical position, proximity and falls, among other features not less important, that will be described throughout the work. The main difference between FollowThem and other applications residing on the market of mobile applications is the meeting of various dispersed functionalities as well as the introduction of several innovative functionalities. This work is guided mostly to describe the mobile application since this is the main contribution of this work. Its most important functionalities are described. The following components are also presented: a caregiver area, which is designed to provide give support to caregivers; and an information area, which is designed to clarify in what the system consists.Atualmente verifica-se um interesse crescente no desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis numa tentativa de contornar a solidão existente na faixa etária sénior. Este interesse estendese, igualmente, aos pais na educação dos seus filhos, no que concerne aos cuidados de vigilância que estas aplicações poderão permitir prestar. Neste contexto, é apresentada uma aplicação móvel desenvolvida para o sistema operativo Android, designada FollowThem. Além da aplicação móvel foram desenvolvidos dois outros componentes: área de cuidador e uma área informativa. A presente aplicação móvel tem como objetivo monitorizar e ajudar idosos e crianças, de forma a se sentirem mais seguros e, simultaneamente dar apoio aos seus cuidadores. FollowThem tem uma interface intuitiva e oferece funcionalidades úteis para os seus utilizadores como detetar a sua posição geográfica, proximidade e quedas, entre outras funcionalidades não menos importantes, referidas ao longo deste trabalho. A principal diferença entre a aplicação FollowThem e as restantes aplicações, residentes no mercado de aplicações móveis, é a reunião de diversas funcionalidades atualmente dispersas por várias aplicações, como também a introdução de funções inovadoras. Este trabalho de mestrado orienta-se, maioritariamente, para a aplicação móvel, uma vez que esta é a principal contribuição. São descritas as suas funcionalidades mais relevantes, sendo, também, apresentados os seguintes componentes: área de cuidador, desenvolvida para dar apoio aos cuidadores, e a área informativa, desenvolvida para esclarecer, de uma forma geral, em que consiste o sistema

ENABLING GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED, INTERGENERATIONAL, CO-OPERATIVE DESIGN

As more children's technologies are designed to be used with a global audience, new technologies need to be created to include more children's voices in the design process. However, working with those who that are geographically distributed as design partners is difficult because existing technologies do not support this process, do not enable distributed design, or are not child-friendly. In this dissertation, I take a research-through-design approach to develop an online environment that enables geographically distributed, intergenerational co-operative design. I began my research with participant-observations of in-person, co-located intergeneration co-operative design sessions that used Cooperative Inquiry techniques at the University of Maryland. I then analyzed those observations, determined a framework that occurs during in-person design sessions and developed a prototype online design environment based on that scaffolding. With the initial prototype deployed to a geographic distributed, intergenerational co-design team, I employed Cooperative Inquiry to design new children's technologies with children. I iteratively developed the prototype environment over eight weeks to better support geographically distributed co-design. Adults and children participated in these design sessions and there was no significant difference between the children and adults in the number of design sessions in which they chose to participate. After the design research on the prototype was complete, I interviewed the child participants who were in the online intergenerational design team to better understand their experiences. During the interviews, I found that the child participants had strong expectations of social interaction within the online design environment and were frustrated by the lack of seeing other participants online at the same time. In order to alleviate this problem, five of the participants involved their families in some way in the design process and created small, remote intergenerational design teams to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the online environment. I compared Online Kidsteam with in-person Kidsteam to evaluate if the online environment was successful in supporting geographically-distributed, intergeneration co-design. I found that although it was not the same in terms of the social aspects of in-person Kidsteam, it was successful in its ability to include more people in the design process

A Fine Motor Skill Classifying Framework to Support Children's Self-Regulation Skills and School Readiness

Children’s self-regulation skills predict their school-readiness and social behaviors, and assessing these skills enables parents and teachers to target areas for improvement or prepare children to enter school ready to learn and achieve. Assessing these skills enables parents and teachers to target areas for improvement or prepare children to enter school ready to learn and achieve. To assess children’s fine motor skills, current educators are assessing those skills by either determining their shape drawing correctness or measuring their drawing time durations through paper-based assessments. However, the methods involve human experts manually assessing children’s fine motor skills, which are time consuming and prone to human error and bias. As there are many children that use sketch-based applications on mobile and tablet devices, computer-based fine motor skill assessment has high potential to solve the limitations of the paper-based assessments. Furthermore, sketch recognition technology is able to offer more detailed, accurate, and immediate drawing skill information than the paper-based assessments such as drawing time or curvature difference. While a number of educational sketch applications exist for teaching children how to sketch, they are lacking the ability to assess children’s fine motor skills and have not proved the validity of the traditional methods onto tablet-environments. We introduce our fine motor skill classifying framework based on children’s digital drawings on tablet-computers. The framework contains two fine motor skill classifiers and a sketch-based educational interface (EasySketch). The fine motor skill classifiers contain: (1) KimCHI: the classifier that determines children’s fine motor skills based on their overall drawing skills and (2) KimCHI2: the classifier that determines children’s fine motor skills based on their curvature- and corner-drawing skills. Our fine motor skill classifiers determine children’s fine motor skills by generating 131 sketch features, which can analyze their drawing ability (e.g. DCR sketch feature can determine their curvature-drawing skills). We first implemented the KimCHI classifier, which can determine children’s fine motor skills based on their overall drawing skills. From our evaluation with 10- fold cross-validation, we found that the classifier can determine children’s fine motor skills with an f-measure of 0.904. After that, we implemented the KimCHI2 classifier, which can determine children’s fine motor skills based on their curvature- and corner-drawing skills. From our evaluation with 10-fold cross-validation, we found that the classifier can determine children’s curvature-drawing skills with an f-measure of 0.82 and corner-drawing skills with an f-measure of 0.78. The KimCHI2 classifier outperformed the KimCHI classifier during the fine motor skill evaluation. EasySketch is a sketch-based educational interface that (1) determines children’s fine motor skills based on their drawing skills and (2) assists children how to draw basic shapes such as alphabet letters or numbers based on their learning progress. When we evaluated our interface with children, our interface determined children’s fine motor skills more accurately than the conventional methodology by f-measures of 0.907 and 0.744, accordingly. Furthermore, children improved their drawing skills from our pedagogical feedback. Finally, we introduce our findings that sketch features (DCR and Polyline Test) can explain children’s fine motor skill developmental stages. From the sketch feature distributions per each age group, we found that from age 5 years, they show notable fine motor skill development

A City in Common: Explorations on Sustained Community Engagement with Bottom-up Civic Technologies

Large technology companies and city councils are increasingly developing smart city programmes: augmenting urban environments with smart and ubiquitous computing devices, to transform how cities are run. At a smaller scale, communities of citizens are appropriating technologies to tackle matters of concern and to effect positive change from the bottom-up. HCI researchers are also deploying civic technology in the wild, sometimes collaborating with these communities, in the pursuit of both scientific and societal impact. However, little is known about how impactful they have been, and the extent to which they have meaningfully engaged communities in the long term. The goal of this PhD is to identify the factors that can guide the design and deployment of engaging, sustainable and impactful civic technology interventions, from the perspective of the communities that they are intended to benefit. Three case studies are presented: an ethnographic study of an existing civic technology, and two design and evaluation studies of novel interventions. A set of themes was derived from the studies that highlight factors that are positively associated to engagement, sustainability and impact. Based on these themes and on experience from deploying interventions, a framework was developed and validated. It comprises six key phases: identification of matters of concern, framing, co-design of community technologies, deployment, orchestration, and evaluation. In line with a new wave of civically engaged HCI and participatory methods, the framework puts people at the heart of socio-technical innovation and technology in the service of the common good by fostering the development of a commons: a pool of community managed resources. Using this approach, the thesis explores how researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, city councils and communities can collaborate to address community issues using digital technologies. It further suggests how citizens can be supported to develop skills that will allow them to appropriate the intervention for their own situated purposes