Sharon Lynn Chu

The effect of familiarity on perceived interestingness of images

We present an exploration of familiarity as a meaningful dimension for the individualized adaptation of media-rich interfaces. In this paper, we investigate in particular the effect of digital images personalized for familiarity on users’ perceived interestingness. Two dimensions of familiarity, facial familiarity and familiarity with image context, are manipulated. Our investigation consisted of three studies: the first two address how morphing technology can be used to convey meaningful familiarity, and the third studies the effect of such familiarity on users’ sense of interestingness. Four levels of person familiarity varying in degree of person knowledge, and two levels of context familiarity varying in frequency of exposure, were considered: Self, Friend, Celebrity, and Stranger in Familiar and Unfamiliar contexts. Experimental results showed significant main effects of context and person familiarity. Our findings deepen understanding of the critical element of familiarity in HCI and its relationship to the interestingness of images, and can have great impact for the design of media-rich systems.

Enabling Instrumental Interaction Through Electronics Making: Effects on Children’s Storytelling

The electronics Making phenomenon, spearheaded by the introduction of open source microprocessors and 3D printers, has been quickly infiltrating into children’s domains, but how Making interacts with storytelling has not been addressed. This paper achieves the following: it proposes the argument of instrumental interaction for Making-based storytelling, it details a custom Maker kit that integrates Making with storytelling, and it presents a study that investigates the effects of electronics Making-based storytelling on the semantics of children’s puppet stories. Analysis results showed that the LED instrumental interaction contributes significantly to the children’s story meanings.

Touch Wire: Interactive Tangible Electricty Game for Kids

This paper presents Touch Wire, a learning environment for teaching the basics of electricity and electronic design to young children. Touch Wire combines a digital touch screen interface with tangible components to bring the concepts of electronic circuitry to the forefront, while removing the tedium of tasks such as wiring for young children. Grounded in constructivist theories of learning, Touch Wire will overlay information about the underlying electrical mechanics on the tablet interface to scaffold childrens learning of electronics. Our demonstrations have given us insight into how to best move forward developing the blended tangible and graphical interfaces of Touch Wire to both enhance the fun experience for children and support their learning of electronic circuitry.

Performative Authoring: Nurturing Storytelling in Children through Imaginative Enactment

This paper presents an empirical study that provides support for the use of enactment in storytelling systems. The overall goal of our research is to facilitate the authoring of stories by children, aged 8 to 10 years. Our findings show that story enactment results in positive effects on the childs storytelling, but only through the mediation of imagination during enactment. Only imaginative enactments support better storytelling. Based on our results, we make a case for enactment as an effective motivator, interface and cognitive tool for children going through a period of development called the Fourth-grade Slump, and we propose the concept of performative authoring for the design of interactive storytelling systems for children.

Fun in Making: Understanding the experience of fun and learning through curriculum-based Making in the elementary school classroom ✰

Abstract In this article, we investigate the child’s experience of fun and learning within curriculum-integrated Maker activities in the elementary school classroom. Little is currently understood as to how Making makes learning fun, particularly in formal educational contexts. We conducted an in-the-wild week-long study that implements Maker activities designed with 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers during science classes. Qualitative video-based analysis of the sessions for six students and analysis of all the students’ self-reports were performed to derive an understanding of the determinants of fun and learning in the children’s experiences. We highlight issues that may inform future directions in the investigation of Making as entertainment technologies in education.

Making as the New Colored Pencil: Translating Elementary Curricula into Maker Activities

We present Making activities designed and observed within the formal environment of elementary school classrooms. Using a collaborative curriculum-matching design process with teachers, 8 Maker activities and lesson plans were developed, and implemented in Science and Language Arts classrooms of a school with a large percentage of students from underrepresented populations, over the course of 18 weeks during one semester. Coded videos revealed three categories of Maker activities: those that enabled learning, demonstrated learning, and provided learning of the concept itself. Experiences of teachers and students also revealed eagerness to participate, engagement, and exploration in the activities, as observed in a series of analyses. Other themes include the importance of multi-sensory exploration and ownership of self-constructed apparatuses with electronics. The resulting Maker activities and lesson plans offer strategies for familiarizing students with electronic tools and fostering tinkering while remaining true to the learning standards of the classroom.

Connectors in Maker Kits: Investigating Children's Motor Abilities in Making

The study of Making to support childrens cognitive or social needs is gaining prominence rapidly. However, little research in Making focuses on childrens motor skills and abilities, especially at younger ages. Arguing that Making provides greater benefits when introduced at elementary school-aged, this paper contributes to the understanding of how children aged 8 to 11 manipulate connectors, a key component of Maker kits. We present a review of connectors used in prior work, a theoretical foundation based on the mediated action theory of affordances, and an empirical study of children using 6 different types of connectors with various affordances. Based on quantitative analysis and qualitative video analysis, we present themes that may guide the design of components in future Maker kits for children, with a view towards usability aligned with childrens capabilities and mental models.

Toward a Making Community of Practice: The Social Aspects of Elementary Classroom-Based Making

As Making moves from informal settings, such as museums and libraries to formal learning contexts, such as the classroom, questions arise with regard to the sustainability of the practice of Making. Learning in the classroom is continuous over time, while the integration of Making currently tend to be necessarily insular and in snapshot interventions. The development of a Making community of practice among students in the classroom is important for classroom-based Making to be sustainable. Grounded in literature on Lave and Wengers communities of practice and Vygotskys zone of proximal development, the work presented in this paper investigate the social aspects of Making in 5th grade science classes as indicators of the possible formation of a Making community of practice among the students. Our findings elicited different types of social roles that the students adopted, and various ways by which learning was socially mediated, and showed how help received and given varied according to student roles and over time. We discuss and conclude with the importance of pursuing further research into this topic area for Making into the classroom.

Information Holodeck: Thinking in Technology Ecologies

Information can be persistently represented on a multitude of devices beyond a single screen and session. This paper explores how technological display and device ecosystems (DDEs) may support human thinking, learning and sensemaking. We propose a theoretical foundation that extends Vygotsky’s sign mediation triangle to include digital information. Through a process we call objectification, perceivable objects, e.g. interface objects, tangible technologies, can be associated with signs to support thinking. We present a qualitative study of learning in a testbed DDE with 12 graduate students. We developed a method that traces digital objects within ‘thinking episodes’ to help us evaluate how technology configurations support objectification. Our findings relate two storylines of how DDE technologies may afford objectification. Our work advances a method informed by psychological theory to examine device ecologies for their potential for learning, and articulates affordances for the design of technology that can help to support higher thought.

Exploring Performative Authoring as a Story Creation Approach for Children

We propose performative authoring, an approach for children to author digital animated stories using pretend play or story enactment. Using a systematic methodology, we designed and developed DiME, a prototype system to explore how children may make use of performative authoring to create stories. Findings showed that children greatly enjoyed the authoring approach, and that DiME supported the child’s imagination of characters, objects and environments during enactment. However, enactment for authoring lacked narrative structuring and the affordance for rapid iterative editing that is critical to creativity. We conclude that performative authoring has great potential to facilitate and even improve children’s storytelling.