The concept of seemingly independent elements/entities in the world having a meaningful impact on each other is a hard concept to convey, even to adults. Because such objects that appear disconnected at first sight can actually be strongly associated, it is important for children to understand how their actions can affect the people and things around them. That is the premise of our work and something we would like to instill in children at the Discovery Museum of Virginia through the novel interconnected exhibits presented, with the common theme UNITE: Understanding Networks & Interconnectedness through Technology Exhibits. We describe UNITE's design—grounded in Interdependence Theory, with some adaptations to accommodate the distant, unidirectional, asynchronous nature of interconnectedness—and present how we anticipate that the unique setup will help children develop basic executive functions, such as perspective-taking, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. We then lay out how the exhibit satisfies the museum's educational requirements and present our assessment plan to evaluate the transferability of skills to new contexts beyond the museum.

A common instructional approach to many CS and engineering classes involves designing a new software system, by providing real-world, open-ended, client-driven, team-based problems, most known as Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs). A significant challenge imposed by this approach comes from accurately and consistently assessing student work where more than one solution can be correct. Therefore, timely feedback is pivotal for student success. Such feedback is fundamental in supporting grading consistency and efficiency for graders, but importantly to scaffold student understanding for student teams working on complex, ill-defined, real-world problems. This poster presents the next step in a two-phase evaluation (the first being a usability test) of a new grading and annotation tool for online technical reports, called e2Logos (evaluating electronic logos). We propose a plan for evaluating the educational impact of e2Logos in the context of an upper-level CS elective course on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The poster will also include a brief presentation of e2Logos, which aims to fill a gap in assessing and grading the rich type of student work submitted in project-based learning (PBL) courses employing MEAs.

In the contemporary attention economy, tech companies design the interfaces of their digital platforms by adopting attention-capture dark patterns to drive their behavior and maximize time spent and daily visits. Two popular examples are viral recommendations and content autoplay on social networks. As these patterns exploit people’s psychological vulnerabilities and may contribute to technology overuse and problematic behaviors, there is the need of promoting the design of technology that better align with people’s digital wellbeing. This workshop seeks to advance this timely and urgent need, by inviting researchers and practitioners in interdisciplinary domains to engage in conversation around the design of interfaces that allow people to take advantage of digital platforms in a meaningful and conscious way.

Museums have been long recognized as legitimate places for out-of-school learning, offering unique experiences for large student groups. However, the challenges of assessing learning and engagement outcomes using technological interventions for large audiences, often undermine the value of these practices. To address the need for understanding how learning unfolds within the context of a museum visit as an interplay between the people, the interactives, and the mediators, we conducted a design evaluation in a science museum. Our focus was understanding the impact of audience interaction on learning and engagement during collaborative games for large student groups. For the purposes of this case study we also designed a physical board game having the dual purpose of a learning activity and an assessment tool. We present the results of our observations and discourse analysis, and discuss them in the light of our previous study in public schools.

One of the most popular audiences of museums is classroom-size groups of students, in the context of school field trips. However, students do not get adequate involvement during interactive group experiences, which might affect their impression and learning gained from the visit. In this paper, we present our findings from a recent study in middle schools, where 507 students were engaged with their class in a learning game about olive oil production. We had two players directly control the game and varied the level of involvement of the audience (the rest of the class), using iPads. We found that higher involvement in the game afforded greater retention of information after two days, while there was no difference after one day. Also, students with direct agency in the game revealed greater learning gains than the audience members. Results about the impact of socioeconomic status and social interactions on learning are reported, along with the most important design implications.

Museums are rich and complex learning experiences, using a variety of interactive approaches to engage their audiences. However, the largely unstructured nature of free-choice learning calls for alternative approaches that can effectively engage groups of school age students with diverse cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we present our findings from a recent study in a museum in Greece, where triads of students had to learn about olive oil production using a game enabling different levels of interactivity and collaboration. We found that facilitation by an expert guide led to greater learning gains as compared to students playing alone, with one or three simultaneous game controllers. We also compared these results with a previous controlled experiment conducted in the US with middle school students, using the same game but without the ecologically valid facilitation. Drawing ideas from sociocultural and cognitive theories we interpret the contradictory findings, identifying the impact of culture on their (social) interactions, their subjective game experience, and eventually learning, in these spaces.

In informal learning spaces employing digital content, such as museums, visitors often do not get adequate exposure to content, or they passively receive instruction offered by a museum docent to the whole group. This research aims to identify which elements of co-located group collaboration, virtual environments, and serious games can be leveraged for an enhanced museum learning and entertaining experience. We developed C-OLiVE, an interactive virtual environment supporting tripartite group collaboration, which we used to explore our hypothesis that synchronous, co-located, group collaboration will afford greater learning compared to conventional approaches. In an empirical study, we found some evidence supporting this hypothesis, taking into consideration other factors such as game experience and social presence. Students participating in the three-player condition demonstrated a better understanding of the collaborative tasks compared to their single-player counterparts. We discuss these results and outline future studies using the same virtual environment.

Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly seen as a core literacy skill for the modern world on par with the longestablished skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. To promote the learning of CT at a young age we capitalized on children's interest in play. We designed RabBit EscApe, a board game that challenges children, ages 610, to orient tangible, magnetized manipulatives to complete or create paths. We also ran an informal study to investigate the effectiveness of the game in fostering children's problemsolving capacity during collaborative game play. We used the results to inform our instructional interaction design that we think will better support the learning activities and help children hone the involved CT skills. Overall, we believe in the power of such games to challenge children to grow their understanding of CT in a focused and engaging activity.

In informal learning spaces employing digital content, such as museums, visitors either do not get adequate exposure to content or get information through passive instruction offered by a museum docent to the whole group. This research aims to identify which elements of co-located group collaboration, virtual environments, and serious games can be leveraged for an enhanced learning experience. Our hypothesis is that synchronous, co-located, group collaboration will afford greater learning compared to conventional approaches. We developed C-OLiVE, an interactive virtual learning environment supporting tripartite group collaboration, which we will use as a testbed to respond to our research questions. In this paper, we discuss our proposed research, which involves exploring some benefits of the involved technologies and proposing a list of design guidelines for anyone interested to exploit them in developing virtual environments for informal learning spaces.

Informal learning in public spaces like museums and location-based entertainment venues is increasingly popular during the last years. Especially in technology-enhanced museums such properties as Virtual Reality, Game-Based Collaboration, and Immersive Displays are considered to bear significant educational value. After extensive literature review we have come to the conclusion that little to no research has been carried out on the learning outcomes of these powerful properties. Thus, the scope of our research is to investigate the learning efficacy of an integrated schema of audience collaboration and game design in immersive virtual reality environments. In order to achieve this, we are going to build and evaluate a theoretical framework that supports collaboration within an audience of 9--14 years old children.