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Paper Beyond Record and Play - Backpacks: Tangible Modulators for Kinetic Behavior

There are four kinds of backpacks where through changing the frequencies, amplitude, etc changes the motion range and strength. These are modular and you can put many backpacks together. When you push the mode you get an accumulated affect. The backpacks are an attempt to make something tangible for children. Throughout this process they have been showing this to children and asking them what they wanted. The children wanted sensors, so they replaced the knob with a light sensor. Also throughout this design process, investigations were conducted through physical feedback.
A demonstration is shown about teaching children properties about waves and phase shift through differences in walking timing. Another idea was to incorporate a mechanical knob to add to the stability and gain feedback, the children were then able to talk about the feedback effect.
In a home environment, 8 children, age 6-10 participated. They also had 2 class sessions with children who had no background in kinetics. Half the class evaluated the backpacks and half the class built backpacks. The children seemed to relate easier to terms such as faster/slower. The light sensor was the most difficult to figure out. The children who programmed the backpacks were adept at the iterative cycle. The children tried adjusting the structure, the motion recording, and then the backpack to change the way the creature walked. For the younger children, they also understood the concept of random backpacks.
In general backpacks were an understandable interface with greater understanding of concepts from the older eighth graders. This is a way to show what children can gain from abstract ideas. While backpacks are not abstract models themselves, they show symbolic kinetic models. Previously these characteristics were only available through symbolic programming. Through backpacks there is another method, a tangible method, to get children interested in hard ideas. Tangible interfaces can make hard ideas more accessible and understandable which simply allow children an opening.
In the future they are working on tangible interfaces for editing.

Q & A

Audience member from CMU
Q: I would like to see an evaluation of what kind of impact this has on other types of learning to find out what people are really learning, what age group it really is appropriate for, etc.

Audience member from Northeastern University
Q: How did the younger children interact with the backpacks?

For the younger children, the backpacks were a bit abstract, and they were more interested in the simple structure. They used the backpacks more when prompted or shown. They did not spontaneously put on backpacks.

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Paper Embedded Phenomena: Using Position-Sensitive Ambient Media to Support Classroom Science Learning [CHI Best Paper]

This paper is not talking about portable devices that can be held in hands but focuses on computation embedded and on science inquiry. As an example he looks at an ant farm and natural processes which are natural and not as reliable versus digital systems which have digital phenomena that children can visit again.
This paper focuses on embedded phenomena and stimulated phenomena which are ‘mapped’ onto the physical space of the classroom. This happens through strategically situate browsers around the classroom. These portals give pieces of information and in order to gain the big picture you need to look at all portals. They run for days and weeks continuously, and they are there so children can observe, record, and find patterns in phenomena. These browser do not take the place of teachers or instructional design and are meant to be used in collaboration with teachers; they are just phenomena.
This is good for learning because it is
-Situated
-Embodied
-Social
-Episodic
-Opportunistic
-More science

Characteristics of embedded phenomena:
-Participatory simulation-Learners themselves are part of participants
-Virtual environment-Work with large displays, VR systems
-Physicality and materials-Using whole room and children are running around
-Ambient media-Displays is always on, attention can come and go
-Mixed reality-Influenced by stories

3 different embedded phenomena:

1-roombugs
The classroom is a small farming community and the goal is to attract good bugs and repel bad bugs. The tablets are sand traps, and the children have the ability to determine bug position and what repellents to use, etc.

2-helioroom
The classroom is the solar system and the goal is to determine the identity of planets after learning about the solar system in the classroom setting. By using a lot of Velcro, tablets are stuck around the classroom. The children would see planets in the same size but using clues such as planets crossing in front of each other, etc so they could figure out which planets are situated where.

3-roomquake
Students are asked to believe that their classroom is an area of intense seismic activity. Roomquakes can happen anytime and are signaled through a deep subwoofer. The children read the seismographs, and they determine the epicenters, mark the epicenters, and determine the magnitude and find the fault line in the classroom. The children would use a long string and sweep out arcs from each of the epicenters. The point where the circles intersected is where the ball was hung at the end.

Outcomes
-Understanding of distribution of earthquakes
-Attitude towards science and investigation-help develop notion that they are empowered investigators
-Not for every teacher, child, and topic
-Requires teacher who is willing to have this happen

Q & A

Audience member from Harvard
Q: How much of a relationship do you have with architects who design classrooms?
-For most of schools that I worked with classroom redesign is not in the horizon, but I thinks that area has great potential for research and design.

Audience member from University of Michigan
Q: Are there a lot of collaborative activities, which can or might not work very well?-The teacher in the background was always reminding the children to change roles and to try different roles and distribute work. The longer duration of the project didn’t really increase the rate of participation of children who were not engaged but it increased the different variety of work for the engaged students.

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Note TAP: Touch-And-Play

Single question-Will intra-body signaling be useful in future of ubiquitous computing?

Intra-body signaling is communication between one hand to another hand. It’s a 10 year old technology, but not well known. For example, the most advance study so far transfers 10 mbps by using your body.

One question people often ask is why use intra-body signaling when you have wireless communication? Intra-body signaling was listed as one of the losers in Spectrum 2006 ‘Losers and Winners’ article. However wireless communication is not perfect. For example when you look at Bluetooth photo printing, this can be a very tough job which users have to learn. There is also the problem of presetting Bluetooth and not being able to print when you have 2 printers near you.

If ubiquitous computing future arrives, the number of devices waiting to serve in a given space increases. The user has to learn a lot more to use them; currently the user has to learn 18 ways for printing using a camera.

Why is so much user manipulation and learning required?
The context in this situation depends on the id of the user, selection of devices, selection of service, data of interest-where all this type of information is manually inputted.

Context awareness computing talks about how computer can know what user wants. The answer is through touch. First impression is that this would be uncomfortable; people are lazy to touch. However, touch is also very intuitive and can provide context.

Key idea-User can print photo by just touching the camera to printer through TAP (Touch and Play). Ubiquitous world with TAP will only require select and touch. The selecting process does not require the cognitive viewpoint of the user.

Conceptual model
Bluetooth transfers data from one device to another; TAP does this through touching. The functional decomposition is half as long for TAP than Bluetooth. Constant touching is not required for TAP; TAP initiates the transfer and wi-fi takes over.

Now they are trying to evaluate users with camera, mp3, etc devices and refine the context matrix. More research into different combinations of device’s importance, intuitiveness, and usefulness is needed.

Audience member from MIT Media Lab
Q: How can this work with Muti-functional devices with no chaos?
-Multifunction convergence devices are usually designed to only have 1 function at a time. If a cell phone is using the mp3 player function, that will be referenced. Also the consumer wants simple interfaces ex) iPod.

Q: To realize this new technology what does the user need to go through?
Well, one can prevent unintentional touch through
-Confirmation process
-Disable tap when device is sleep
-Specifically designated tap button or area

Audience member from Motorola
Q: What is the size of the hardware, power consumption, sensor, etc?
The transmitter is a microcontroller and the system is relatively simple.