294 research outputs found
Opportunistic Uses of the Traditional School Day Through Student Examination of Fitbit Activity Tracker Data
In large part due to the highly prescribed nature of the typical school day for children, efforts to design new interactions with technology have often focused on less-structured after-school clubs and other out-of-school environments. We argue that while the school day imposes serious restrictions, school routines can and should be opportunistically leveraged by designers and by youth. Specifically, wearable activity tracking devices open some new avenues for opportunistic collection of and reflection on data from the school day. To demonstrate this, we present two cases from an elementary statistics classroom unit we designed that intentionally integrated wearable activity trackers and childcreated data visualizations. The first case involves a group of students comparing favored recess activities to determine which was more physically demanding. The second case is of a student who took advantage of her knowledge of teachers’ school day routines to test the reliability of a Fitbit activity tracker against a commercial mobile app
Failure Artifact Scenarios to Understand High School Students' Growth in Troubleshooting Physical Computing Projects
Debugging physical computing projects provides a rich context to understand
cross-disciplinary problem solving that integrates multiple domains of
computing and engineering. Yet understanding and assessing students' learning
of debugging remains a challenge, particularly in understudied areas such as
physical computing, since finding and fixing hardware and software bugs is a
deeply contextual practice. In this paper we draw on the rich history of
clinical interviews to develop and pilot "failure artifact scenarios" in order
to study changes in students' approaches to debugging and troubleshooting
electronic textiles (e-textiles). We applied this clinical interview protocol
before and after an eight-week-long e-textiles unit. We analyzed pre/post
clinical interviews from 18 students at four different schools. The analysis
revealed that students improved in identifying bugs with greater specificity,
and across domains, and in considering multiple causes for bugs. We discuss
implications for developing tools to assess students' debugging abilities
through contextualized debugging scenarios in physical computing
Knowing and Throwing Mudballs, Hearts, Pies, and Flowers: A Connective Ethnography of Gaming Practices
Little is known concerning how young players learn to participate in various activities in virtual worlds. We use a new integrative approach called connective ethnography that focuses on how a gaming practice spread across a network of youth at an after school club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world, Whyville.net. To trace youth participation in online and offline social contexts, we draw on multiple sources of information: observations, interviews, videos, online tracking and chat data, and hundreds of hours of play in Whyville ourselves. One gaming practice – the throwing of projectiles and its social uses and nuances – became the focal point of our analyses. The discussions address the methodological challenges underlying the synthesis of diverse types of data that allowed us to follow youth across multiple spaces as well as initial insights into how this practice was used to negotiate relationships in multiple spaces through play
A Connective Ethnography of Peer Knowledge Sharing and Diffusion in a Tween Virtual World
Prior studies have shown how knowledge diffusion occurs in classrooms and structured small groups around assigned tasks yet have not begun to account for widespread knowledge sharing in more native, unstructured group settings found in online games and virtual worlds. In this paper, we describe and analyze how an insider gaming practice spread across a group of tween players ages 9–12 years in an after-school gaming club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world called Whyville.net. In order to understand how this practice proliferated, we followed the club members as they interacted with each other and members of the virtual world at large. Employing connective ethnography to trace the movements in learning and teaching this practice, we coordinated data records from videos, tracking data, field notes, and interviews. We found that club members took advantage of the different spaces, people, and times available to them across Whyville, the club, and even home and classroom spaces. By using an insider gaming practice, namely teleporting, rather than the more traditional individual person as our analytical lens, we were able to examine knowledge sharing and diffusion across the gaming spaces, including events in local small groups as well as encounters in the virtual world. In the discussion, we address methodological issues and design implications of our findings
Collaborative Agency in Youth Online and Offline Creative Production in Scratch
Few studies have focused on how youth develop agency to organize and participate in online unstructured creative collaborations. This paper describes and analyzes how youth programmers organized collaborative groups in response to a programming “Collab Challenge” in the Scratch Online Community and in an accompanying workshop with high school students. The analyses focused on modalities of online collaborations, determined the breadth of online participation, and examined local teens’ awareness of the online community. The discussion addresses youth’s collaborative agency in these new networked contexts, studied the role that online social awareness plays in completing tasks and makes recommendations for the support of online programming communities
An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities
In online discussion communities, users can interact and share information
and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create
multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by
deceiving others or manipulating discussions. In this work, we study
sockpuppetry across nine discussion communities, and show that sockpuppets
differ from ordinary users in terms of their posting behavior, linguistic
traits, as well as social network structure. Sockpuppets tend to start fewer
discussions, write shorter posts, use more personal pronouns such as "I", and
have more clustered ego-networks. Further, pairs of sockpuppets controlled by
the same individual are more likely to interact on the same discussion at the
same time than pairs of ordinary users. Our analysis suggests a taxonomy of
deceptive behavior in discussion communities. Pairs of sockpuppets can vary in
their deceptiveness, i.e., whether they pretend to be different users, or their
supportiveness, i.e., if they support arguments of other sockpuppets controlled
by the same user. We apply these findings to a series of prediction tasks,
notably, to identify whether a pair of accounts belongs to the same underlying
user or not. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of deception in
online discussion communities and paves the way towards the automatic detection
of sockpuppets.Comment: 26th International World Wide Web conference 2017 (WWW 2017
Effects of a group-based lifestyle medicine for depression : a pilot randomized controlled trial
Given the growing evidence that a range of lifestyle factors are involved in the etiology of depression, a ‘lifestyle medicine’ approach can be potentially safe and cost-effective to prevent or treat depression. To examine the effects and acceptability of a group-based, integrative lifestyle medicine intervention as a standalone treatment for managing depressive symptoms, a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted in a Chinese adult population in 2018. Participants (n = 31) with PHQ-9 score above the cut-off of ≥ 10, which was indicative of moderate to severe depression, were recruited from the general community in Hong Kong and randomly assigned to lifestyle medicine group (LM group) or care-as-usual group (CAU group) in a ratio of 1:1. Participants in the LM group received 2-hour group sessions once per week for six consecutive weeks, which covered diet, exercise, mindfulness, psychoeducation, and sleep management. Linear mixed-effects model analyses showed that the LM group had a significant reduction in PHQ-9 scores compared to the CAU group at immediate posttreatment and 12-week posttreatment follow-up (d = 0.69 and 0.73, respectively). Moreover, there were significantly greater improvements in anxiety, stress, and insomnia symptoms (measured by DASS-21 and ISI) at all time points in the LM group (d = 0.42–1.16). The results suggests that our 6-week group-based, integrative lifestyle intervention program is effective in lowering depressive, anxiety, stress, and insomnia symptoms in the Chinese population. Further studies in clinical populations with a larger sample size and longer follow-up are warranted
Endogenous fantasy and learning in digital games.
Many people believe that educational games are effective because they motivate children to actively engage in a learning activity as part of playing the game. However, seminal work by Malone (1981), exploring the motivational aspects of digital games, concluded that the educational effectiveness of a digital game depends on the way in which learning content is integrated into the fantasy context of the game. In particular, he claimed that content which is intrinsically related to the fantasy will produce better learning than that which is merely extrinsically related. However, this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic (or endogenous and exogenous) fantasy is a concept that has developed a confused standing over the following years. This paper will address this confusion by providing a review and critique of the empirical and theoretical foundations of endogenous fantasy, and its relevance to creating educational digital games. Substantial concerns are raised about the empirical basis of this work and a theoretical critique of endogenous fantasy is offered, concluding that endogenous fantasy is a misnomer, in so far as the "integral and continuing relationship" of fantasy cannot be justified as a critical means of improving the effectiveness of educational digital games. An alternative perspective on the intrinsic integration of learning content is described, incorporating game mechanics, flow and representations
Design approaches in technology enhanced learning
Design is a critical to the successful development of any interactive learning environment (ILE). Moreover, in technology enhanced learning (TEL), the design process requires input from many diverse areas of expertise. As such, anyone undertaking tool development is required to directly address the design challenge from multiple perspectives. We provide a motivation and rationale for design approaches for learning technologies that draws upon Simon's seminal proposition of Design Science (Simon, 1969). We then review the application of Design Experiments (Brown, 1992) and Design Patterns (Alexander et al., 1977) and argue that a patterns approach has the potential to address many of the critical challenges faced by learning technologists
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