After months of prep and paperwork, our kitchen and bath renovation begin today. Here are a couple of panoramic shots (made with AutoStitch) showing them just prior to construction. I’ll be posting more details over the coming weeks.
Kitchen:
Bath:
#hcil Assessing the Components of Skill Necessary for Playing Video Games (Kent Norman)
- why video game skills? they improve visual skills, attention skills, multitasking, spatial cognition, creativity, decision-making, probabilistic inference
- 1/4 of variability in game performance predicted by volume of certain brain structures; game performance correlated with laparoscopic surgery skills (at least 6 hours of games a week); action video games train the brain to better process certain visual information
- project seeks to develop an easy coding procedure for video games and explore usefulness for science and industry
- study 1: student interns rated 24 skills on necessary-unecessary likert scale on a number of games; rated 79 games then clustered them by genre (defined via wikipedia entries, a type of crowd-sourcing)
- study 2: 6 items added to coding scheme; each student in class rated 5 games they were familiar with (some were gaming addicts, others couldn’t code), plus game forums and facebook events; 100 different games coded, 335 codings; motor coordination, verbal understanding, manage resources, observation-looking around, creativity and problem solving, human-human interaction, persistence
- looked at 6 specific games to do a skill profile: Assassin’s Creed (observation), Angry Birds (human-human, persistence), Mario Kart (coordination), Professor Layton (verbal, creativity, persistence), Dance Central (coordination; almost identical to Mario Kart), Final Fantasy (verbal, Â creativity)
- conclusions: can profile video games for necessary skills, can map aspects to game features
- future: look at more specific games and make generalizability; look at expert versus novice in each; lead to reviews and recommendations; map skills to genres and games within genres; what game should I give my kid for certain skills?
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#hcil Low Fidelity Prototyping for Location-based, Social Games (Anne Bowser)
- PLACE approach: Prototyping Location, Activities, and Collective Experience
- geo-caching has led to an explosion of location-based social games
- Floracaching: geocaching for citizen scientists – go out into the wild to look for a plant, take a picture and upload it; plant-lifecycle data is studied by scientists to study climate change; QR code at each cache; complete activities; earn badges
- prototypes must simulate: location, social interaction, activities, and time
- snow-ball sampling: have initial recruits enlist their friends and family
- prototype: recruitment, floracaches, choose activities, find caches, visit caches
- get feedback and scale up slowly; start small, scale up, let the users choose
- principles: low-fidelity prototypes should not be polished, activities more important than interfaces, start small and scale up, testing should be done in the field, respect authentic social experience
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#hcil Designing Collaborative Learning into Alternate Reality Games (Beth Bonsignore)
- what is an alternate reality game? an interactive story scattered across many different media that people are already familiar with; pervasive gaming; collaborative learning environments
- how do you design to promote collaborative learning?
- components: individual accountability; positive interdependence; promotive interaction; group processing
- Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry (AGOG): civil-war era; focused on invention and patent office; 60 students participated
- content learning goal: engage with history
- cooperative learning goal
- positive interdependence: secret society with 4 skill specialities
- individual accountability: earn badges for individual training
- promotive interaction: multi-channel communication, in-game character to model positive feedback
- group processing: daily check-ins, mid-point meeting, final debrief and survey
- final mission focused on positive interdependence
- data collection from the game and interactions, field notes, artifacts, post-game survey
- findings: badges were very important for individual accountability; sought help from each other for positive interdependence; in-game character was important for promotive interaction; wall of evidence and mid-point meeting important for group processing
- conclusions: deeply engaging for students; fostered critical thinking; interlocking tasks drove positive teamwork experiences in learning
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#hcil Video Chat for Pets (Jen Golbeck)
- Jen has a webcam to check in on her dog when she’s not home; wants to know more, wants more interactive; but dogs don’t text
- Video Chat for Pets; interact with pet in different ways; based on Skype
- evaluated with 10 dogs and 10 owners; worked with both at the same time, then separated them to try remote interaction;
- sound panel; virtual laser pointer; virtual tadpole
- sound panel works well with dogs; owners rated each of the interactions; sound really worked with almost all dogs, even remotely; tadpole only worked with one dog; same with laser pointer
- dogs weren’t bothered by disembodied voice of owner
- future: explore other remote interactions (smell); cats (had problems); remote fetching
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#hcil SearchParty: Learning to search in a web-based classroom (Ben Bederson)
- MOOCs – massive online open courses; Udacity, Coursera, edX
- how is the availability of large amounts of great online courses affecting UMD? is there still a place for classroom teaching? how does the university have to shift?
- how can we use available technology in the classroom? laptops and smartphones, smart boards, regulation on personally identifying information, learn from each other, great instructors
- teach students how to search in the classroom with SearchParty; did an exercise to try it; based on Google’s questions for teaching people to search better
- maybe a better model is to do the reading, exercises at home, and come to the classroom to interact and extend the learning
- we can build tools to support “The Flipped Classroom” – turning the traditional classroom on its head
- problem in promoting this change: students prefer lecture courses to interactive courses – give worse reviews to interactive ones – because they are easier
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#hcil Technology for Promoting Scientific Practice and Personal Meaning in Life-Relevant Learning (Jason Yip and Tammy Clegg)
- children need to see science as relevant; scientific evidence, skills, and argumentation matters; traditional science learning is alien, boring, disconnected
- create life-relevant learning environments; scientifically meaningful experiences; it’s chaotic; personal engagement
- challenges: kids forget purpose, end investigations prematurely, fail to recognize importance of scientific investigations, need help pursuing interests and goals
- technology can support scientific inquiry and cooperative inquiry; existing technology is too structured or too open-ended; design technology to support scientifically meaningful experiences
- participatory design with children, technology designers, and educators
- Zydeco – structured support; create entry -> comment on entry -> tag entry -> aggregate data
- StoryKit – create/edit story -> add media
- Kitchen Chemistry – summer camp; how can Zydeco and StoryKit support the experiences?
- data collection -> coded data for scientific practice + personal meaning
- findings: technology supported documented experiment, scientific observations, and measurement procedures; supported personal meaning for creativity, documenting group experience, playfulness
- Zydeco: tags (reflective, short, later analysis)
- StoryKit: storytelling is a natural scaffold; supported scientific inquiry; learners wanted and likes; free form media integration; document personal experiences and personalize scientific contributions
- next steps: ScienceKit – visualization, tagging, storytelling tool
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#hcil Case Study of Cooperative Inquiry Techniques in a Classroom of Children with Special Learning Needs (Elizabeth Foss)
- expand cooperative inquiry to broader population; can it be used in a classroom of children with special learning needs? autism, learning disability, attention deficits
- project: design a sports game using technology
- design techniques: big paper, mixing ideas, bags of stuff, storyboarding, sticky noting, kidreporting
- lots of data collection, qualitative coding (emergent themes)
- findings: cooperative inquiry works with kids with special needs with a few small adjustments
- recommendations: informal time, high adult-to-child ration, written and auditory directions, plan for high engagement
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#hcil BingoHunt: Mobile ubiquitous vocabulary learning (Ben Bederson)
- mobile app to support vocabulary learning
- flash-cards and vocabulary lists are not the best way to teach vocabulary; provide context and meaning, make it social, use the body
- most children now have mobile phones; look for words in natural environment
- teacher can set up game with online app; kids use app on phone, during or after school
- get a grid of words, take pictures to try and get five in a row; on web app, teams review and approve boards to make sure photos match the words
- current status: trials in lab and feedback from teachers; teachers want to do more than vocabulary; like the social aspect; fits curriculum and teaching practices; adaptability is important
- limitations: works best with concrete words; technology access and logistics
- mobile app vs mobile web: native = higher quality, hardware access, harder to write and port; chose hybrid approach, wrote own container (many now using PhoneGap)
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#hcil Designing Sci-dentities: How Sci-Fi, Re-Mix, and social media can promote youth interest in science (Mega Subramaniam and June Ahn)
- goal: get kids more engaged with science
- after school program in primarily poorer neighborhoods in DC area
- design of library space is very important to foster interest and engagement; add resources to libraries to attract kids in
- design for multiple literacies; story-telling rather than writing, record stories, multi-media and pictures
- co-design the online community with librarians and students
- in use, discover issues of kids gaming the site; e.g. re-mix allows cloning of others’ work  to change, but got points for just cloning; redesigning better re-mix model this summer
- design experiences, not merely curriculum or technology
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