Mark Stringer

Curriculum-focused design

In this paper we describe a technique of Curriculum-Focused Design, and the aspects of our research experience on which the technique is based. Our technique is a variant of Druins Cooperative Inquiry. Cooperative Inquiry is a well-developed design practice for children, but it has been practised largely outside the classroom. Druins technique has also been developed in American schools, which have greater curriculum flexibility than English schools, which are highly curriculum-focused. We studied the English curriculum and identified an area that we believed could fruitfully be augmented by technology. Our design approach was novel insofar as our evaluation sessions doubled as lessons for students. Our interdisciplinary design team, including a former teacher with over 10 years classroom experience, evaluated the interface in a classroom setting, providing strong environmental validity to the design process.

Tangible interface for collaborative information retrieval

Most information retrieval (IR) interfaces are designed for a single user working with a dedicated interface. We present a system in which the IR interface has been fully integrated into a collaborative context of discussion or debate relating to the query topic. By using a tangible user interface, we support multiple users interacting simultaneously to refine the query. Integration with more powerful back-end query processing is still in progress, but we have already been able to evaluate the prototype interface in a real context of use, and confirmed that it can improve relevance rankings compared to single-user dedicated search engines such as Google.

Teaching rhetorical skills with a tangible user interface

We describe Webkit, an application which uses a large-screen graphical user interface and a tangible user interface to teach children important rhetorical skills. We discuss our evaluation of this application and possible future directions for computer-supported rhetorical applications.

Novel Computer-Controlled Saturation of Dynamic Centrifuge Models Using High Viscosity Fluids

The practice of saturating centrifuge models with a highly viscous pore fluid is widely used. As the fluid saturates the model, care must be taken to ensure that the hydraulic gradients are not too high to cause excessive disturbance to the model. A new computer-controlled saturation system (CAM-Sat) has been developed and implemented at the University of Cambridge to aid the saturation of soil models with a high viscosity pore fluid. Models are saturated under vacuum and pore fluid enters through ports in the model’s base. The system controls the ingress of pore fluid into the model by monitoring the fluid mass flux and then altering the pressure drop between a reservoir of pore fluid and the model. The system was found to be stable across a wide range of fluid viscosities and sand types. A further test showed that the system was able to respond to changes in mass flux demanded by the researcher.