Do tangible interfaces enhance learning?

Conceptual work on tangible interfaces has focused primarily on the production of descriptive frameworks. While this work has been successful in mapping out a space of technical possibilities and providing a terminology to ground discussion, it provides little guidance on the cognitive or social effects of using one type of interface or another. In this paper we look at the area of learning with tangible interfaces, suggesting that more empirically grounded research is needed to guide development. We provide an analytic framework of six perspectives, which describes latent trends and assumptions that might be used to motivate and guide this work, and makes links with existing research in cognitive science and education

The effect of representation location on interaction in a tangible learning environment

Drawing on the 'representation' TUI framework [21], this paper reports a study that investigated the concept of 'representation location' and its effect on interaction and learning. A reacTIVision-based tangible interface was designed and developed to support children learning about the behaviour of light. Children aged eleven years worked with the environment in groups of three. Findings suggest that different representation locations lend themselves to different levels of abstraction and engender different forms and levels of activity, particularly with respect to speed of dynamics and differences in group awareness. Furthermore, the studies illustrated interaction effects according to different physical correspondence metaphors used, particularly with respect to combining familiar physical objects with digital--based table-top representation. The implications of these findings for learning are discussed

Unprepared to be Culturally Responsive: An Examination of Secondary ESL Educators in Rural Louisiana

The purpose of this study was to examine the problem of instructing English learners in a rural Louisiana district. The following questions guided this study: (1) How do the teachers perceive their pre-service and in-service training for English learners?, (2) How do the teachers perceive their ability to implement culturally responsive pedagogical practices for English learners?, (3) How do the teachers perceive the district’s approach to tangible, informational, and emotional supports for English learners?, and (4) What are the teachers’ perceptions, if any, of sociocultural inequities faced by English learners? And how, if any, do these sociocultural inequities affect the quality of education for English learners? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants in “Woodland Parish,” representing 1/3 of the high school English teachers in the district. Instructional artifacts were collected to establish internal validity. Analysis of the data indicated an overall lack of ESL training as well as support, a misunderstanding of best practices for English learners, and a racially complex perspective on cultural integration. This study indicated that little progress has been made to recognize English learners and to provide tools for them to succeed in Woodland Parish. Additionally, teachers in this district still have to overcome their social, cultural, and institutional barriers in order to establish quality education for their ESL population

Les Cartouches, un concept d'interfaces tangibles, appliquées à l'apprentissage des jeunes enfants

8 pagesDans certains cas, les technologies permettent des expériences d'apprentissage qui n'auraient pas été atteintes par d'autres moyens. Les interfaces homme-machine avancées permettent d'interagir avec le monde numérique d'une manière simple et attractive. Par exemple, avec les interfaces tangibles, les données numériques sont incarnées par des objets physiques. Cependant, ces nouvelles interfaces manquent souvent de représenter des actions de base (core operations : lancer/fermer une application, authentification, sauvegarde, ...) ; domain operations : choisir une couleur, sélectionner un fichier sur le disque, ...) permettant d'aboutir à un système achevé et autonome. Les Cartouches sont une proposition de réponse (tangible) à cette problématique, que ce soit au sein d'une interface tangible ou de tout environnement informatisé. Nous étudions dans cet article l'utilisation des Cartouches au cœur de la conception d'environnements d'apprentissages pour les jeunes enfants ne sachant pas encore lire. En effet, l'interaction tangible offre de nombreux avantages pour l'apprentissage, notamment à destination des jeunes enfants. Nous proposons d'implanter diverses opérations avec les Cartouches dans le contexte de l'apprentissage avec les technologies et soumettons un exemple de conception réalisé autour d'une table interactive. Les Cartouches ouvrent la voie à la conception de nouveaux environnements d'apprentissage informatisés achevés - notamment à destination de populations particulières, comme les aveugles ou les analphabètes - qui devront être prototypés et donner lieu à des expérimentations utilisateur

Musical Instruments for Novices: Comparing NIME, HCI and Crowdfunding Approaches

Designing musical instruments to make performance accessible to novice musicians is a goal which long predates digital technology. However, just in the space of the past 6 years, dozens of instrument designs have been introduced in various academic venues and in commercial crowdfunding campaigns. In this paper, we draw comparisons in design, evaluation and marketing across four domains: crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo; the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference; conferences in human-computer interaction (HCI); and researchers creating accessible instruments for children and adults with disabilities. We observe striking differences in approach between commercial and academic projects, with less pronounced differences between each of the academic communities. The paper concludes with general reflections on the identity and purpose of instruments for novice musicians, with suggestions for future exploration

Share Your Values! Community-Driven Embedding of Ethics in Research

Ethically-defensible research requires wide-ranging, holistic, and deep consideration. It is often overseen by Research Ethics Committees, Institutional Research Boards or equivalents but not all organisations have these and where they do, their degree of independence from organisational priorities varies (perhaps leading to research that would create reputational or other difficulties for organisations being left unpublished or unacknowledged). Conflicts of interest can therefore be left unmanaged, participants may be exploited, and society may not benefit. In this paper, we claim that publishing communities (e.g. scholarly conferences) can play a larger role in supporting improved ethical practice by defining and communicating the ethical values of their community’s collective identity and aspirations. This approach is not prescriptive like procedural ethics nor as broad as general research ethics codes (both are important) but offers a tangible way to unify ethics concerns across research contexts

Methods and design issues for next generation network-aware applications

Networks are becoming an essential component of modern cyberinfrastructure and this work describes methods of designing distributed applications for high-speed networks to improve application scalability, performance and capabilities. As the amount of data generated by scientific applications continues to grow, to be able to handle and process it, applications should be designed to use parallel, distributed resources and high-speed networks. For scalable application design developers should move away from the current component-based approach and implement instead an integrated, non-layered architecture where applications can use specialized low-level interfaces. The main focus of this research is on interactive, collaborative visualization of large datasets. This work describes how a visualization application can be improved through using distributed resources and high-speed network links to interactively visualize tens of gigabytes of data and handle terabyte datasets while maintaining high quality. The application supports interactive frame rates, high resolution, collaborative visualization and sustains remote I/O bandwidths of several Gbps (up to 30 times faster than local I/O). Motivated by the distributed visualization application, this work also researches remote data access systems. Because wide-area networks may have a high latency, the remote I/O system uses an architecture that effectively hides latency. Five remote data access architectures are analyzed and the results show that an architecture that combines bulk and pipeline processing is the best solution for high-throughput remote data access. The resulting system, also supporting high-speed transport protocols and configurable remote operations, is up to 400 times faster than a comparable existing remote data access system. Transport protocols are compared to understand which protocol can best utilize high-speed network connections, concluding that a rate-based protocol is the best solution, being 8 times faster than standard TCP. An HD-based remote teaching application experiment is conducted, illustrating the potential of network-aware applications in a production environment. Future research areas are presented, with emphasis on network-aware optimization, execution and deployment scenarios

An electronic architecture for mediating digital information in a hallway fac̦ade

Ubiquitous computing requires integration of physical space with digital information. This presents the challenges of integrating electronics, physical space, software and the interaction tools which can effectively communicate with the audience. Many research groups have embraced different techniques depending on location, context, space, and availability of necessary skills to make the world around us as an interface to the digital world. Encouraged by early successes and fostered by project undertaken by tangible visualization group. We introduce an architecture of Blades and Tiles for the development and realization of interactive wall surfaces. It provides an inexpensive, open-ended platform for constructing large-scale tangible and embedded interfaces. In this paper, we propose tiles built using inexpensive pegboards and a gateway for each of these tiles to provide access to digital information. The paper describes the architecture using a corridor fa\c{c}ade application. The corridor fa\c{c}ade uses full-spectrum LEDs, physical labels and stencils, and capacitive touch sensors to provide mediated representation, monitoring and querying of physical and digital content. Example contents include the physical and online status of people and the activity and dynamics of online research content repositories. Several complementary devices such as Microsoft PixelSense and smartdevices can support additional user interaction with the system. This enables interested people in synergistic physical environments to observe, explore, understand, and engage in ongoing activities and relationships. This paper describes the hardware architecture and software libraries employed and how they are used in our research center hallway and academic semester projects

Teaching and learning queueing theory concepts using tangible user interfaces

Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) have emerged in the past years as effective computing platforms that intertwine digital information and visualization with physical interactivity. Whilst successfully capitalizing on these properties within primary education to engage and educate children in an entertaining manner, TUI systems have seen limited deployment in more complex scenarios. To this end, this paper investigates the aptness and effectiveness of implementing TUI systems to enhance teaching and learning within higher educational institutes in order to aid the understanding of complex and abstract concepts. The proposal augments mere simulation processes by developing a table-top architecture to allow the real-time interaction and visualization of queuing theory concepts. The paper describes the deployment of the TUI framework within an undergraduate computer networks degree whereby the quantitative effectiveness of this system is assessed from a teaching and learning perspective within an engineering pedagogy