Explanation-Giving in a Collaborative Tangible Tabletop Game: Initiation, Positionality, Valence and Action-Orientation

Explanations given to each other by 20 pairs of 5th grade children while playing a tangible tabletop sustainability game were analyzed inductively for key themes relating to their use of language, gesture and system tools. Half the pairs had been assigned roles (human development or natural resources manager) with associated system controls. Findings showed that explanations by pairs in both conditions often employed collectivist language (“we”) in conjunction with positive reflections on the game-world state using the provided Impact Tool which gave feedback while system was paused. Pairs in the roles condition also gave explanations in response to partner actions and more frequently included negative and actionoriented prospective language about what should be changed moving forward. Roles pairs additionally used questions to seek confirmation or action from their partner and made comments from the perspective of the inhabitants of the fictional world. Implications for theresearch and design of collaborative tabletop learning systems are discussed

Why Tangibility Matters: A Design Case Study of At-Risk Children Learning to Read and Spell

Tangibles may be effective for reading applications. Letters can be represented as 3D physical objects. Words are spatially organized collections of letters. We explore how tangibility impacts reading and spelling acquisition for young Anglophone children who have dyslexia. We describe our theory-based design rationale and present a mixedmethods case study of eight children using our PhonoBlocks system. All children made significant gains in reading and spelling on trained and untrained (new) words, and could apply all spelling rules a month later. We discuss the design features of our system that contributed to effective learning processes, resulting in successful learning outcomes: dynamic colour cues embedded in 3D letters, which can draw attention to how letter(s) position changes their sounds; and the form of 3D tangible letters, which can enforce correct letter orientation and enable epistemic strategies in letter organization that simplify spelling tasks. We conclude with design guidelines for tangible reading systems

Designing with biosignals: Challenges, opportunities, and future directions for integrating physiological signals in human-computer interaction

Biosensing technologies are a rapidly increasing presence in our daily lives. These sensor-based technologies measure physiological processes including heart rate, breathing, skin conductance, brain activity and more. Researchers are exploring biosensing from perspectives including: engineering, human-computer interaction, medicine, mental health, consumer products, and interactive art. These technologies can enhance our interactions allowing connection to our bodies and others around us across diverse application areas. However, designing with biosignals in Human-Computer Interaction presents new challenges pertaining to User Experience, Input/Output, interpretation of signals, representation, and ethics. There is an urgent need to build a scholarly community that includes the diverse perspectives of researchers, designers, industry practitioners and policymakers. The goal of this workshop is to leverage the knowledge of this community aiming to map out the research landscape of emerging challenges and opportunities, and to build a research agenda for future directions

Diverse perspectives on interdisciplinarity from members of the college of the Royal Society of Canada

Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is embraced by the current generation of academics, the benefits and risks for doing so, and the barriers and facilitators to achieving interdisciplinarity, represent inherent challenges. Much has been written on the topic of interdisciplinarity, but to our knowledge there have been few attempts to consider and present diverse perspectives from scholars, artists, and scientists in a cohesive manner. As a team of 57 members from the Canadian College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (the College) who self-identify as being engaged or interested in interdisciplinarity, we provide diverse intellectual, cultural, and social perspectives. The goal of this paper is to share our collective wisdom on this topic with the broader community and to stimulate discourse and debate on the merits and challenges associated with interdisciplinarity. Perhaps the clearest message emerging from this exercise is that working across established boundaries of scholarly communities is rewarding, necessary, and is more likely to result in impact. However, there are barriers that limit the ease with which this can occur (e.g., lack of institutional structures and funding to facilitate cross-disciplinary exploration). Occasionally, there can be significant risk associated with doing interdisciplinary work (e.g., lack of adequate measurement or recognition of work by disciplinary peers). Solving many of the world’s complex and pressing problems (e.g., climate change, sustainable agriculture, the burden of chronic disease, and aging populations) demands thinking and working across long-standing, but in some ways restrictive, academic boundaries. Academic institutions and key support structures, especially funding bodies, will play an important role in helping to realize what is readily apparent to all who contributed to this paper—that interdisciplinarity is essential for solving complex problems; it is the new norm. Failure to empower and encourage those doing this research will serve as a great impediment to training, knowledge, and addressing societal issues

Developmentally situated design (DSD: making theoretical knowledge accessible to designers of children’s Technology

There is a wealth of theoretical knowledge about the developmental abilities and skills of children. However, this knowledge is not readily accessible to designers of interactive products. In this paper, we present the requirements, design and evaluation of developmentally situated design (DSD) cards. DSD cards are a design tool that makes age specific information about children's developing cognitive, physical, social, and emotional abilities readily accessible for designers. Initial requirements were elicited through interviews with design practitioners and students. The cards were evaluated through a design-in-use study in which design students used the cards to address three different design problems. Our analysis of observational notes and post-design interviews revealed how the cards' characteristics enabled different kinds of uses including framing, orienting, inspiring, informing, integrating and constraining. We conclude with a discussion of possible refinements and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of our approach

Workshop on embodied interaction : theory and practice in HCI

For over ten years researchers in human-computer interaction (HCI) have explored an embodied perspective that seeks to describe and explain the fundamental role played by the physical body in how we experience, interact with and understand computation in the world we live in. Recently, such a perspective has been used to discuss human actions and interactions with a range of computational applications including tangibles, mobiles, wearables, tabletops and interactive environments. This workshop aims to enable participants to critically explore the different approaches to incorporating an embodied perspective in HCI research, and to develop a shared set of understandings and identification of differences, similarities and synergies between our research approaches

Identifying embodied metaphors in children's sound-action mappings

Physical activity and manipulating physical objects can be beneficial for learning. Earlier studies 2 have shown that interaction models that rely on unconscious and embodied knowledge (based on embodied metaphors) can benefit the learning process. However, more than one embodied metaphor might be applicable. In this paper, we present the results of a user study (n=65) designed to identify embodied metaphors seven to nine year old children use when enacting abstract concepts related to musical sound. The results provide evidence that multiple different embodied metaphors can unconsciously be used to structure the understanding of these concepts. In addition, we have identified and categorized commonly used metaphors based on the children's enactments of changing sound concepts

Designing a Museum Multi-touch Table for Children

Abstract. Tangible user interfaces allow children to take advantage of their experience in the real world with multimodal human interactions when interacting with digital information. In this paper we describe a model for tangible user interfaces that focuses mainly on the user experience during interaction. This model is related to other models and used to design a multitouch tabletop application for a museum. We report about our first experiences with this museum application

MoSo tangibles : evaluating embodied learning

Using tangible interaction in interactive educational systems can benefit learning. This can be supported by relying on experientially originating schemata in the interaction design of learning systems. This paper presents the design and evaluation of MoSo Tangibles, a set of interactive, physical artifacts with which children manipulate the pitch, volume and tempo of ongoing tones, in order to structure their understanding of these abstract sound concepts in terms of multiple different concrete body-based concepts. The results indicate that MoSo provided children with a physical handle to reason about the targeted abstract concepts