Team Igniter: an adaptive toolkit to guide and leverage collaboration in teams seeking to problem-solve and innovate

Even though interdisciplinarity has been constantly debated and supported during faculty meetings at RIT, still, academic programs confine themselves into silos, hampering student integration. The struggle to effectively collaborate becomes evident in the existent on campus initiatives that challenge students from different disciplines to work together. The consequence is the under-utilization of the students\u27 potential which leads to mediocre outcomes. This thesis investigated main collaboration problems typical of groups seeking to problem-solve such as groupthink, production blocking, social loafing and social anxiety. These issues were studied in the academic context through a user-centered methodology that involved observations and interviews with college students. The proposed solution integrated user experience (UX) methods with social psychology’s research findings and game design dynamics into a toolkit constituted of both digital and tangible components that complemented each other to offer an interactive and immersive experience. The purpose of the toolkit was to provide a fluid framework to guide teams seeking innovation in order to leverage student collaborations and thus promote a truly academic synergy that is likely to lead to more innovative ideas and solutions

Robocart: System Design for the First Generation Autonomous Golf Cart

Inspired by ongoing research and continuous developments in autonomous vehicles, the Robocart MQP focuses on the system development for a first-generation autonomous golf cart vehicle and wireless system server. By creating the foundation for a modular and interdisciplinary system, visualization software and mechanisms can be intuitively integrated. The end result of this project is a better understanding of the efficiency of each subsystems against the real-time challenges required for an autonomous, wireless, and vision-based system. In conclusion of this project, recommendations in mechanical, electrical, and algorithm development were formed to promote further research and enhance rider usability

Supporting collaborative work using interactive tabletop

PhD ThesisCollaborative working is a key of success for organisations. People work together around tables at work, home, school, and coffee shops. With the explosion of the internet and computer systems, there are a variety of tools to support collaboration in groups, such as groupware, and tools that support online meetings. However, in the case of co-located meetings and face-to-face situations, facial expressions, body language, and the verbal communications have significant influence on the group decision making process. Often people have a natural preference for traditional pen-and-paper-based decision support solutions in such situations. Thus, it is a challenge to implement tools that rely advanced technological interfaces, such as interactive multi-touch tabletops, to support collaborative work. This thesis proposes a novel tabletop application to support group work and investigates the effectiveness and usability of the proposed system. The requirements for the developed system are based on a review of previous literature and also on requirements elicited from potential users. The innovative aspect of our system is that it allows the use of personal devices that allow some level of privacy for the participants in the group work. We expect that the personal devices may contribute to the effectiveness of the use of tabletops to support collaborative work. We chose for the purpose of evaluation experiment the collaborative development of mind maps by groups, which has been investigated earlier as a representative form of collaborative work. Two controlled laboratory experiments were designed to examine the usability features and associated emotional attitudes for the tabletop mind map application in comparison with the conventional pen-and-paper approach in the context of collaborative work. The evaluation clearly indicates that the combination of the tabletop and personal devices support and encourage multiple people working collaboratively. The comparison of the associated emotional attitudes indicates that the interactive tabletop facilitates the active involvement of participants in the group decision making significantly more than the use of the pen-and-paper conditions. The work reported here contributes significantly to our understanding of the usability and effectiveness of interactive tabletop applications in the context of supporting of collaborative work.The Royal Thai governmen

Co-design of augmented reality textbook for children’s collaborative learning experience in primary schools

Augmented Reality (AR) is a recent technology that allows a seamless composition between virtual objects and the real world. This practice-based research uses the affordances of AR to design an AR textbook for collaborative learning experience. It identifies the key concepts of children s AR textbooks for the designing and evaluation of collaborative learning experiences. These concepts were used to develop a conceptual framework for the AR textbook that considers collaborative experience, learning and usability. Informed by these concepts, the research also has identified the design features which are unique to AR affordances which can be integrated in the school textbooks to develop a collaborative AR textbook for primary school children. The research follows a participatory design approach to involve the users of the AR textbook in the design process. The researcher has conducted three co-design studies involving primary school children and adults using cooperative inquiry techniques. The first study uses low-tech prototyping to find the overall direction of designing the AR textbook. After the development of the first AR textbook prototype, two formative evaluations have been conducted using cooperative inquiry critiquing, and layered elaboration techniques. Throughout these studies, a conceptual framework has been developed namely, Experience, Learn and Use (ELU) for the designing and evaluation of children s AR textbooks for collaborative learning experience. This framework is based on the adaption of Janet Read s Play, Learn, Use (PLU) model that defines children s relationships with the interactive technologies. The research proposes the ELU framework as a useful classification framework in the evaluation process, which informs the design features of the AR textbook which are related to the concepts of collaborative experience, learning and usability. The practical component of the thesis proposes a sample of an AR textbook that is integrated in the regular school curriculum. It demonstrates the design features which can be implemented in other textbooks to support collaborative learning experiences for primary school children. The documentation of the co-design process provides a practical framework for co-designing an AR textbook with children, as well as an evidence of using the ELU framework in practice. 4 This research also contributes in bridging the gap between AR and Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) communities, through the use of common CCI methods in the AR development. This research has resulted in key design principles which contribute original knowledge to the literature of the AR for children s education considering the CCI perspective. These important principles are informed by the collaborative experiences, learning and usability aspects that establish a framework for the design and evaluation of collaborative AR textbook for children. The eight identified principles by this research are, Joint Textbooks, Personalised AR Experience, Interactive AR Book, Communication-Based Learning, Rewarding AR feedback, Audio AR Textbook, Intuitive AR Markers, and Mutual AR Display. The research introduces the definition for each of the concepts and a demonstration of the related design features in the outcome of the AR textbook prototype

A smartphone application prototype for exchanging valuable real time public transport information among travellers

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

COLLAGE: a collaborative Learning Design editor based on patterns

CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) constitutes a significant field that has drawn the attention of many researchers and practitioners (Dillenbourg, 2002). This domain is characterized by the coexistence of very different expectations, requirements, knowledge and interests posed by both collaborative learning practitioners and experts in information and communication technologies. In other words, CSCL is an intrinsically interdisciplinary field that implies a need for mutual understanding among the implied stakeholders. This need demands the active participation of all these stakeholders during the whole development cycle of CSCL solutions. Participatory Design (PD) approaches (Muller & Kuhn, 1993) propose a diversity of theories, practices, etc. with the goal of working directly with users and other stakeholders in the design of social systems. That is, PD methodologies define processes where users and developers work together during a certain period of time, while they identify the requirements of an application. In the CSCL case, it has been shown that it is not efficient enough to simply perform the identification and analysis of requirements for the development of CSCL solutions that support effective ways of learning. Collaborative learning practitioners also become active players in the process of customizing technological solutions to their particular needs in every learning situation. PD poses a new requirement that CSCL developers should tackle: how to obtain technological solutions for collaborative learning capable of being particularized/customized by practitioners that usually do not have technological skills

The integration of information and ideas : creating linkages through a novel concept design method

This paper describes the ICR Grid as a novel representation of information and ideas. Developed as a method for enhancing utilization of digital information sources in conceptual design, the name is derived from the cognitive processes (inform, create, reflect) that are systematically employed and the resulting grid output. As a prescriptive method, it requires design teams to find and build information resources in parallel with creating solutions. It does, however, maintain the freedom of designers to decide on the direction of exploration, and encourages flexible thinking by using an activity-based approach. The output of the method is a linked grid of information sources and their application that emphasizes their relationships and evolution over time. The paper reviews the evaluation of a prototype ICR Grid in a number of industrial scenarios using a shared OneNote document, and outlines the development path for future bespoke implementations. As digital technologies and organizational strategies continue to rapidly evolve, this work is timely in bringing new thoughts on how information is sourced, used and managed in the development of ideas. Issues regarding team structures and interaction, information reuse, and the capture of rationale are also addressed in relation to the grid format. It is anticipated the findings will be of particular interest to industrial designers, information specialists, and the digital library community, as well as being of relevance to any organization undertaking idea generation or problem solving

Tools and Methods to Analyze Multimodal Data in Collaborative Design Ideation

Collaborative design ideation is typically characterized by informal acts of sketching, annotation, and discussion. Designers have always used the pencil-and-paper medium for this activity, partly because of the flexibility of the medium, and partly because the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of conceptual design cannot easily be supported by computers. However, recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices for creating and sharing ideas. In order to provide computer support for collaborative ideation in a way that augments traditional media rather than imitates it, it is necessary to study the affordances made available by digital media for this process, and to study designers\u27 cognitive and collaborative processes when using such media. In this thesis, we present tools and methods to help make sense of unstructured verbal and sketch data generated during collaborative design, with a view to better understand these collaborative and cognitive processes. This thesis has three main contributions