Heidy Maldonado

Integrating Co-design Practices into the Development of Mobile Science Collaboratories

Scientific practices increasingly incorporate sensors for data capture, information visualization for data analysis, and low-cost mobile devices for field-based inquiries incorporating open web standards. While a broad range of design approaches for developing technology-enhanced learning has been used by researchers and practitioners for the last 15 years, significant challenges for educational use remain as new technologies and user experiences continually evolve outside the classroom. We focus on the specific design challenge of how to initiate the co-design process together with teachers, researchers, scientists, designers, and developers in order to devise and develop mobile science collaboratories that support open inquiry-based learning in ecology education. The outcomes presented in this paper point towards the need for additional methods to support co-design that take into consideration future user experiences needed for developing and implementing these types of learning activities

Technology for design education: a case study

We present results of the first longitudinal study of physical and digital technology hybrids for design education. Through deployment in an introductory HCI class, we have instrumented and analyzed traditional design practices with newer technological components. In particular, we show that hybrid Idea Logs that maintain the flexibility of paper notebooks can successfully implement the fluidity needed between teammates in design projects, and between the digital and physical world. Our preliminary analysis of questionnaires, performance data, and student design notebooks support our hypothesis that this hybrid of technologies may effectively address the needs of this domain, and suggest that basic digital affordances such as export and sharing of design content can improve the educational experience.

Tigrito: a multi-mode interactive improvisational agent

This paper presents the implementation of Tigrito, an affective computer character. We outline how Tigrito can be used to study chidren’s sense of engagement and relationship with virtual toys in different modes of interaction.

The Role of Affect and Sociality in the Agent-Based Collaborative Learning System

As computer systems are evolving and coming to be regarded as social actors, the importance of social intelligence that enables natural and socially appropriate interactions is gaining a growing interest among the human-computer interaction researchers. This article discusses the definition, importance, and benefits of social intelligence as agent technology. It then describes a collaborative learning system that incorporates agents that are equipped with a social intelligence model. We argue that socially appropriate affective behaviors provide a new dimension for collaborative learning systems. The system provides an environment in which learning takes place through interactions with a coaching computer agent and a co-learner, an autonomous agent that makes affective responses. The social intelligence model that handles affective responses is based on psychological theories of personality, emotion, and human-media interaction, such as appraisal theory and the Media Equation. Experiments conducted with this collaborative learning system to examine the effect of the social intelligence model suggested that users had more positive impressions about the usefulness, the application, and their learning experience when the co-learner agent displayed social responses with personality and emotions than when it did not express them. It should be noted here that the co-learner agent did not provide any explicit assistance for the learner, such as giving clues and showing answers, yet it influenced the user’s evaluation on the usefulness of the learning system. Experimental data also suggest that the co-learner agent contributed to the effectiveness of the learning system.

Tigrito: a high-affect virtual toy

This paper presents a short overview of Tigrito, a highaffect virtual toy where children observe and interact with emotive improvisational characters, which we built to study the sense of engagement and suspension of disbelief across different modes of interaction, and the affective relationship between children and a virtual toy.

An Implementation of Socially-Intelligent Agents providing Emotional Support and its Application

In this paper, we propose a software platform for realizing applications using socially-intelligent agents. Socially-intelligent agents are software agents which employ social intelligence. Although there exist many types of social intelligence, we focus on a type of social intelligence for providing emotional support. Applying the type of social intelligence, our socially-intelligent agents behave like people by simulating social behavior of people. We show how we realize the socially-intelligent agents through an explanation on the conceptual architecture of our software platform. We also show the mechanism for generating social behavior which makes our software platform unique. According to the theory of media equation, we expected socially-intelligent agents will cause good effect for users. To justify our expectation, we implemented an application of our socially-intelligent agents for eLearning. We give explanation about the application and how socially-intelligent agents work in it. We also discuss our ideas on social intelligence and show our direction for future works.

The Funki Buniz Playground: facilitating multi-cultural affective collaborative play

The Funki Buniz Playground is an environment where children can interact with each other simultaneously in both a virtual world -- through their avatars -- and the real world, which we built to study cross cultural affective responses and multi-cultural empathy. This paper describes some of the interaction design challenges we encountered while implementing the Funki Buniz Playground, as well as the constraints and solutions we discovered.