Realistic sound propagation is important for immersive game audio, yet its implementation remains a balance between physics-based accuracy and creative design. This paper presents a survey on physics-based techniques for sound propagation rendering in video games. It explores the perspectives of professional sound designers working in the video games industry, examining their approaches and prioritization in implementation. The key findings reveal a complex relationship between physicsbased calculation and creative design preferences, highlighting a significant gap between academic theory and practical solution design. The study offers a practical discussion and insights for implementing sound propagation effects in industry projects.

Tree-based model editors and hybrid graphical-textual model editors have advantages and limitations when editing domain models. Data is displayed hierarchically in tree-based model editors, whereas hybrid graphical-textual model editors capture high-level domain concepts graphically and low-level domain details textually. We conducted an empirical user study with 22 participants to evaluate the implicit assumption of system modellers that hybrid notations are superior, and to investigate the tradeoffs between the default EMF-based tree model editor and a Sirius/Xtext-based hybrid model editor. The results of the user study indicate that users largely prefer the hybrid editor and are more confident with hybrid notations for understanding the meaning of conditions. Furthermore, we found that the tree editor provided superior performance for analysing ordered lists of model elements, whereas activities requiring the comprehension or modelling of complex conditions were carried out faster through the hybrid editor.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both significant disruption and catalysed extensive experimentation in how education has been and may be delivered worldwide. The discipline of computing has been part of this experimentation, and significant innovations have been implemented and disseminated. Furthermore, educational provision and learner expectations may have evolved in response to the experiences during the pandemic; whilst still subject to disruption, higher education in many jurisdictions is still returning to a new (ab)normal. In the UK, whilst there has been a return to traditional face-to-face delivery, one estimate suggests that nearly a third of courses continue to involve some hybrid learning as opposed to about 5% before the pandemic. Learners' preferences for delivery approach remains critical and has been explored in previous work predominately by survey-based approach. This single UK institutional case study explores learner preferences by using workshops (N=45 students across ten workshops) which aspires to co-create an understanding of issues and benefits of the learning, teaching and assessment approaches adopted in the pandemic and identify preferences for future directions. The workshops employed the sailboat retrospective template; they suggest that the preferences are varied but commonly include some face-to-face study and that digital exclusion, social engagement, and motivation/distraction are vital factors to be addressed for further adoption of hybrid or online learning.

This paper responds to sustainable HCI’s call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local effects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collective resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of effectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable speculative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated participatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.

Educators have long researched student attention and how this influences learning, teaching and assessment. Focusing on how this specifically impacts upon CS education, we present early work that constructs a deeper understanding of CS student attention during learning and teaching activities, alongside co-designing a set of recommendations. We conducted an in-depth analysis of student perspectives and experiences related to their attention in CS courses through diaries and focus groups, working with students as partners on recommendations for increasing student attention and engagement. The outcomes of this preliminary work provides the foundation for developing future engagement activities and targeted interventions for undergraduate CS students.

Researchers are increasingly exploring collaborative behaviour in complex socio-technical systems through in-the-wild investigations to understand, evaluate and technology. The space configuration and tools available in such activities are crucial for the successful collaboration of a group. This work offers an in-the-wild examination of six groups tackling a design project working in an artifact ecology, a space rich in physical and digital artifacts. We delve into the physical and digital space of each of the groups during a 3-month duration to obtain a rich understanding of their collaborative activities. The aim of this work is two-fold; provide summative narrations of each one of the five models of DiCoT to extract design implications and evaluate the usefulness of DiCoT as an analytical tool for understanding artifact ecologies. Through a rich dataset – interviews, focus groups, reflective diaries, online interactions, and video recordings – we construct a summative description of the group behaviour based on the methodological framework of Distributed Cognition for Teamwork. Drawing on these narrations, we provide design implications on the use of an artifact ecology as a shared space for design activities. Both outcomes are then used to evaluate the usefulness of DiCoT as an analytical tool for artifact implications.

There is steadily growing interest in the design and evaluation of digitally enhanced spaces in the real-world where users use, combine, and appropriate different physical and digital tools based on the task at hand. Under the notion of “ubiquitous computing,” researchers have explored tools and theories to analyze, understand, and model users in complex socio-technical systems. Yet, even though theoretical approaches play a significant role in the work of practitioners, there is a general difficulty in applying them, pushing researchers to explore methodological frameworks with clearer guidelines. Using the distributed cognition for teamwork (DiCoT) framework, we study collaboration and communication patterns, physical movement, and social structures of two groups of learners working on a design problem as they evolve over a 3-month period. Through an in-depth investigation, we present detailed accounts of the social and evolutionary models of DiCoT for each group. Our analysis enriches the DiCoT framework by identifying five new principles: social emersion and social circles of privacy for the social model, and continuity, mutual adaptation, and semantics of body for the evolutionary model. This article contributes to HCI research by refining and extending the existing DiCoT framework and elaborating on two dimensions that have previously been under-developed in the literature.

This work is concerned with the exploration of ideas in the realm of technology for peace, produced by small groups of students working around an interactive tabletop. A collaboration-enforcing tabletop application was used to mediate dialog and collaborative construction of a taxonomy of ideas based on the participants' consensus. The scenarios for discussion concerned the promotion of global peace and the social integration of immigrants in the society. The participants' dialog and interactions were video-recorded and analyzed. The study contributes a systematically developed coding scheme capturing the cognitive and physical elements of problem-based group collaboration around the interactive tabletop. Also, the consistent themes and ideas contributed across the participating groups highlight a number of areas where research could focus in terms of using technology for peace.