Exploring the Impact of Varying Levels of Augmented Reality to Teach Probability and Sampling with a Mobile Device

abstract: Statistics is taught at every level of education, yet teachers often have to assume their students have no knowledge of statistics and start from scratch each time they set out to teach statistics. The motivation for this experimental study comes from interest in exploring educational applications of augmented reality (AR) delivered via mobile technology that could potentially provide rich, contextualized learning for understanding concepts related to statistics education. This study examined the effects of AR experiences for learning basic statistical concepts. Using a 3 x 2 research design, this study compared learning gains of 252 undergraduate and graduate students from a pre- and posttest given before and after interacting with one of three types of augmented reality experiences, a high AR experience (interacting with three dimensional images coupled with movement through a physical space), a low AR experience (interacting with three dimensional images without movement), or no AR experience (two dimensional images without movement). Two levels of collaboration (pairs and no pairs) were also included. Additionally, student perceptions toward collaboration opportunities and engagement were compared across the six treatment conditions. Other demographic information collected included the students' previous statistics experience, as well as their comfort level in using mobile devices. The moderating variables included prior knowledge (high, average, and low) as measured by the student's pretest score. Taking into account prior knowledge, students with low prior knowledge assigned to either high or low AR experience had statistically significant higher learning gains than those assigned to a no AR experience. On the other hand, the results showed no statistical significance between students assigned to work individually versus in pairs. Students assigned to both high and low AR experience perceived a statistically significant higher level of engagement than their no AR counterparts. Students with low prior knowledge benefited the most from the high AR condition in learning gains. Overall, the AR application did well for providing a hands-on experience working with statistical data. Further research on AR and its relationship to spatial cognition, situated learning, high order skill development, performance support, and other classroom applications for learning is still needed.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Educational Technology 201

"When He Feels Cold, He Goes to the Seahorse"-Blending Generative AI into Multimaterial Storymaking for Family Expressive Arts Therapy

Storymaking, as an integrative form of expressive arts therapy, is an effective means to foster family communication. Yet, the integration of generative AI as expressive materials in therapeutic storymaking remains underexplored. And there is a lack of HCI implications on how to support families and therapists in this context. Addressing this, our study involved five weeks of storymaking sessions with seven families guided by a professional therapist. In these sessions, the families used both traditional art-making materials and image-based generative AI to create and evolve their family stories. Via the rich empirical data and commentaries from four expert therapists, we contextualize how families creatively melded AI and traditional expressive materials to externalize their ideas and feelings. Through the lens of Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC), we characterize the therapeutic implications of AI as expressive materials. Desirable interaction qualities to support children, parents, and therapists are distilled for future HCI research.Comment: to appear at ACM CHI '2

A Rule Set for the Future

This volume, Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected, identifies core issues concerning how young people's use of digital media may lead to various innovations and unexpected outcomes. The essays collected here examine how youth can function as drivers for technological change while simultaneously recognizing that technologies are embedded in larger social systems, including the family, schools, commercial culture, and peer groups. A broad range of topics are taken up, including issues of access and equity; of media panics and cultural anxieties; of citizenship, consumerism, and labor; of policy, privacy, and IP; of new modes of media literacy and learning; and of shifting notions of the public/private divide. The introduction also details six maxims to guide future research and inquiry in the field of digital media and learning. These maxims are "Remember History," "Consider Context," "Make the Future (Hands-on)," "Broaden Participation," "Foster Literacies," and "Learn to Toggle." They form a kind of flexible rule set for investigations into the innovative uses and unexpected outcomes now emerging or soon anticipated from young people's engagements with digital media

Intellectual Property in Experience

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019. Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners exclusive rights to supply our fantasy worlds with everything from goods to a good time. But are there any limits? Do merchandising rights extend to fan activity, from fantasy-themed birthday parties and summer camps to real world Quidditch leagues? This Article challenges the conventional account, arguing that as the economic value of fantasy merchandising increases in the emergent “experience economy,” intellectual property owners may prove less keen on tolerating uncompensated uses of their creations. In fact, from Amazon’s Kindle Worlds granting licenses for fan fiction, to crackdowns on sales of fan art sold on internet sites like Etsy, to algorithms taking down fan videos from YouTube, the holders of intellectual property in popular fantasies are seeking to create a world requiring licenses to make, do, and play. This Article turns to social and cultural theories of art as experience, learning by doing, tacit knowledge, and performance to demonstrate that fan activity, from discussion sites to live-action role-playing fosters learning, creativity, and sociability. Law must be attentive to the profound effects these laws have on human imagination and knowledge creation. I apply the insights of these theories to limit merchandising rights in imaginative play through fair use, the force in the legal galaxy intended to bring balance to intellectual property law

Examining Temporal Trends and Design Goals of Digital Music Instruments for Education in NIME: A Proposed Taxonomy

This paper presents an overview of the design principles behind Digital Music Instruments (DMIs) for education across all editions of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Music Expression (NIME). We compiled a comprehensive catalogue of over hundred DMIs with varying degrees of applicability in the educational practice. Each catalogue entry is annotated according to a proposed taxonomy for DMIs for education, rooted in the mechanics of control, mapping and feedback of an interactive music system, along with the required expertise of target user groups and the instrument learning curve. Global statistics unpack underlying trends and design goals across the chronological period of the NIME conference. In recent years, we note a growing number of DMIs targeting non-experts and with reduced requirements in terms of expertise. Stemming from the identified trends, we discuss future challenges in the design of DMIs for education towards enhanced degrees of variation and unpredictability