EXPLORING THE CREATION OF IMMERSIVE AND RESPONSIVE SPACES FOR INTERRELATIONSHIP THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF PLAYFULNESS

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020 is causing serious damage to many countries. As of May, the number of confirmed patients worldwide is at 3.35 million and the death toll stands at 239,000 people. As a way to prevent the pandemic, most countries encourage people to keep social or physical distance and self-quarantine. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they recommend that people stay at least six feet away from each other and the South Korean government also recommend keeping their distance from each other at least two meters. Because of the current situation, the places where people can interact with each other, such as schools, businesses, restaurants, etc., are not able to function properly because of the prevention of people’s physical contact with each other and the need to ‘social distance’ and this is causing continued economic deterioration. Through this pandemic, I have realized once again how important interrelationships are in the society we belong to, and at the same time, how the society we live in has been changed by modern technologies. With the development of automobiles, machinery and technology day by day, these modern technologies have become a natural convergence of our society. But as a result, teenagers, in particular, were exposed too much to the information technology, such as mobile phones and computers, and such developments have caused a lack of thinking, creativity and physical abilities, resulting in a cut-off in communication with each other, and making it a non-face-to-face and isolated society. People in various fields, such as philosophy, sociology, and art, talk about how important each other\u27s interrelationship plays a role in shaping the framework of society. While the development of technology is increasing the number of people who are becoming isolated from society, the development of these technologies now helps people engaging in constant exchanges to escape the isolated environment by allowing them to see and communicate with each other at a time when they have to maintain a distance of more than six feet or be isolated at home by the COVID-19 pandemic. An important difference in the impact of technology on well-being lies in other aspects of technology, how it is used, and with other users and situations. Just as the technological developments exemplify the potential to have a positive impact on people\u27s lives, I also aim to apply a positive use of technology to create a virtual interactive space where people can once again feel how important interrelationships are in our society through experiences. I have so far emphasized two things, the concept of playfulness and designing a virtual interactive space optimized for engagement and play, for the past two years to create the virtual space based on my experience. The goal of my thesis work, based on the two things that I have emphasized greatly above, is to build an environment in which audiences can share various movements through cooperation without being restricted by their actions or aware of the surrounding environment, to enhance their thinking, creativity, and engaged living by using the design I envisioned through instilling positive emotions. Unfortunately, my thesis work could not be installed due to the current pandemic and it is also unclear that if the design I structured for people was successful. It greatly affected the development of work, and made it impossible to install and interact with various players in that it is necessary to return to South Korea due to the closure of the studio and the pandemic

Knowledge and skills transfer from a postgraduate course in computer-based education to teaching practice

Emerging technologies are changing human beings as well as their social matrix in which they interact. The integration of ICT into education is an indication of societal and cultural change and as the social matrix becomes altered, it imposes different demands on the individual components of the greater community. It is often not easy for people to accept change and initially they resist it. In this inquiry, some of the tensions that exist in such an activity system have been identified. Vygotskian theory stipulates that human beings learn with and from each other through mediation of psychological and physical tools. The two participants in this inquiry, registered for the postgraduate course in Computer-based Education (CBE) to enable them to interact with the tools of ICT. The theoretical and practical components of the course also exposed them to the concept of learning through technology. The knowledge and skills acquired related to the use of computer technology in educational settings was supposed to help them to interact with technology at the school where they were employed to teach. In order to transfer skills and knowledge back to teaching practice the two participants needed the support of colleagues, school management, parents and other members of the greater community as defined by their activity system to enable them to achieve this. Through the analysis of a single focus group interview and two individual interviews, initial findings show that existing rules and policies within the school need to be adapted to accommodate the introduction of ICT at the school. It is also apparent from the findings that there are a number of tensions that influence the transfer of skills and knowledge from the postgraduate course to teaching practice. These tensions are inherent to the unique context as defined by the greater school community. The participants report that, due to a number of reasons, they are not interacting with ICT tools as much as they were expecting to. This is becoming frustrating to them as they are not applying what they learned. They feel that their knowledge is becoming redundant because of this. Most of the tensions between the various components of the activity system as defined in this inquiry originate from the insufficient preparation for the introduction of computers in educational settings at the school. Furthermore, participants report a lack of support from colleagues and management structures as well as parents and other parties who form part of the immediate community at the school. As a result of this it is difficult for them to integrate ICT into their daily teaching and learning activities. It is also interesting to note that the graduates of the CBE course also focus more on the upliftment of other staff members when they return to the school and are very concerned about getting these colleagues to learn basic computer skills. As a result they do not integrate the technology into their teaching and learning. Furthermore, when they do get the learners to use the computers at the school they still focus on basic skills not related to the teaching and learning of their subject or learning area. These, and a number of other issues, are described in the findings of this inquiry and explained in terms of tensions that arise between the various components of this activity system.Dr. G. Lautenbac

Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations

Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified

Comparison of engagement and emotional responses of older and younger adults interacting with 3D cultural heritage artefacts on personal devices

The availability of advanced software and less expensive hardware allows museums to preserve and share artefacts digitally. As a result, museums are frequently making their collections accessible online as interactive, 3D models. This could lead to the unique situation of viewing the digital artefact before the physical artefact. Experiencing artefacts digitally outside of the museum on personal devices may affect the user's ability to emotionally connect to the artefacts. This study examines how two target populations of young adults (18–21 years) and the elderly (65 years and older) responded to seeing cultural heritage artefacts in three different modalities: augmented reality on a tablet, 3D models on a laptop, and then physical artefacts. Specifically, the time spent, enjoyment, and emotional responses were analysed. Results revealed that regardless of age, the digital modalities were enjoyable and encouraged emotional responses. Seeing the physical artefacts after the digital ones did not lessen their enjoyment or emotions felt. These findings aim to provide an insight into the effectiveness of 3D artefacts viewed on personal devices and artefacts shown outside of the museum for encouraging emotional responses from older and younger people

Setting the stage – embodied and spatial dimensions in emerging programming practices.

In the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Bringing tabletop technologies to kindergarten children

Taking computer technology away from the desktop and into a more physical, manipulative space, is known that provide many benefits and is generally considered to result in a system that is easier to learn and more natural to use. This paper describes a design solution that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer for manipulative learning. After analysis of children's cognitive and psychomotor skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game that is suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on the observation of children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment of the prototype

System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education

A report summarising the findings of the TEL programme in the wider context of technology-enhanced learning and offering recommendations for future strategy in the area was launched on 13th June at the House of Lords to a group of policymakers, technologists and practitioners chaired by Lord Knight. The report – a major outcome of the programme – is written by TEL director Professor Richard Noss and a team of experts in various fields of technology-enhanced learning. The report features the programme’s 12 recommendations for using technology-enhanced learning to upgrade UK education