Synchronous hybrid learning allows physically distributed students and teachers to participate simultaneously in learning activities. Despite the growing interest in synchronous hybrid learning, there remains a need for further investigation into effective pedagogical approaches and technological implementations that support teacher-student interactions at the school level. Addressing this, we present a prototype of an in-house holographic telepresence environment for synchronous hybrid learning, demonstrated through an exploratory study connecting students and teachers across two continents. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the six participating teachers to understand their experiences and perceptions related to the application of holographic telepresence for synchronous hybrid learning. Thematic analysis of the interview data highlights the pedagogical challenges that teachers faced, identifies technological environment design improvements, and outlines new opportunities for enhancing synchronous hybrid learning experiences. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on leveraging immersive technologies to enhance education in diverse and geographically separated settings.

Background. Concurrent and parallel programming is difficult to teach and learn as the understanding of complex and abstract concepts such as nondeterminism, semaphore, and rare conditions, among others, is required [1, 2, 9], having as a core issue the synchronisation of processes to achieve a common goal [4]. It is well-acknowledged that concurrent and parallel programming skills are fundamental since, nowadays, computing is increasingly handled in a parallel manner [7].

Child-centred design acknowledges the significance of a child's input during collaborative design processes, allowing the potential residing in their imagination and experiences to come forth. However, when younger pre-schoolers —3–6-year-olds—are involved in participatory research, it is difficult for design researchers to connect diverse children towards collaborating on fruitful design outcomes while accepting pre-schoolers’ own-initiated play expressions. This paper argues that by incorporating enjoyment of construction play, pre-schoolers can provide distinctive insights concerning key co-design themes: participation, design activities and material exploration. This study proposes a plaything with intent methodology that scaffolds serious exploratory design process embracing the pre-schoolers’ unpredictable higgledy-piggledy behaviour. Results demonstrate that this methodology enables the empowerment of pre-schoolers as self-reliant stewards while (a) capturing their voice of self-expression effectively, and (b) achieving a self-determined specific design concept. As further outcome, a dialogue tool that enables reflexivity concerning participant experiences within participatory inquiries was produced.

The increasing pervasiveness of inclusive educational environments poses an urgent need to implement research methodologies and practices that could shed light on how children's social interactions unfold in such contexts. Our work explores the use of mobile eye tracking technology in naturalistic, inclusive K12 education settings towards a richer understanding of the children’s interactive behaviours. This paper presents the children’s responses to, experiences with and impressions about the naturalness of using mobile eye tracking glasses during a collaborative group task. Results highlight the importance of understanding the children’s experiences to foster naturalistic research environments that closely reflect real-life complexity. Our work contributes towards the deployment of research designs in naturalistic contexts, providing important clues towards the collection of ecologically valid real-world data.

Previous work in learning analytics have been fruitful in shedding lights on collaborative learning environments, such work has provided insights and recommendations that helped improve the collaborative process in computer-mediated learning environments. Given the importance of social interactions and their influence on learning (e.g., in determining academic growth, perseverance in the course and persistence). In this study, we look at both learning and social networks, what factors they share, how they impact or influence learning, and what influences the formation of these networks. Our results show similarities and differences between both networks such as: interactions in the social network predict those in the learning network, however, only centrality measures in the learning network correlate with performance, probably due to the selective nature of replies and interactions in the learning network.

Digital technology is radically changing people's lives and work in industry, finance, services, media and commerce, and this requires a change in the education and training arena as well. However, changes in educational practices are taking a long time to reflect the increasingly pervasive use digital technologies in our 21st century society. In this course I will draw from the experiences of introducing digital fabrication and making to formal and informal education contexts using a solid craft- and project-based pedagogical approach deployed within five interconnected stages: ideation, planning, creating, programming and sharing. The course covers the use of making technologies in education, detailing this design thinking and inquiry-based pedagogical methodology as well as technological platforms that support the deployment of digital fabrication and making tools within learning ecosystems. The course is carried out as a three-hours practical session, including hands-on group work to develop a physical computer-supported artefact.

Digipack Pro is a backpack that facilitates youngsters' social interactions and promotes playful activities during social encounters. It combines wearables technologies with universal design practices to transform an everyday item into a tool that supports social inclusion and well-being. Here we present our contextualisation of the Digipack Pro from several ideas of children around the world on issues of health, gaming and well-being.

Teams of students creating digital artefacts using crafts, 3D printing, electronics, microcontrollers, and computer programming can result in significant science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) learning. An ecosystem of carefully selected tools, diverse project ideas, and a well-designed pedagogic structure can greatly facilitate this.

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: India, the United Kingdom and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in India employ dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland use a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices.

We investigate the influence of counsellors' state of emotions on their emotion perception through annotation agreement of emotions in text. Selected counsellors were tasked to annotate sample corpora from International Survey on Emotion Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR), and students' life stories. We explore the intra and inter-counsellors' annotation agreements of emotions in the corpora during several annotation sections. The results show strong intra-counsellors' annotation agreement of emotions in both corpora, whereas the inter-counsellors' annotation agreement yielded weakly in both corpora. Results also show that counsellors' emotions vary and influence their decisions when analysing emotions in text.

A major limitation in the automatic detection of affect, feelings, emotions, sentiments, and opinions in text is the lack of proper differentiation between these subjective terms and understanding of how they relate to one another. This lack of differentiation not only leads to inconsistency in terminology usage but also makes the subtleties and nuances expressed by the five terms difficult to understand, resulting in subpar detection of the terms in text. In light of such limitation, this paper clarifies the differences between these five subjective terms and reveals significant concepts to the computational linguistics community for their effective detection and processing in text.

With gesture-based interactions in mobile settings becoming more popular, there is a growing concern regarding the social acceptance of these interaction techniques. In this paper we begin by examining the various definitions of social acceptance that have been proposed in the literature to synthesize a definition that is based on how the user feels about performing a particular interaction as well as how the bystanders perceive the user during this interaction. We then present the main factors that influence gestures' social acceptance including culture, time, interaction type and the user's position on the innovation adoption curve. Through a user study we show that an important factor in determining social acceptance of gesture-based interaction techniques is the user's perception of others ability to interpret the potential effect of a manipulation.

This paper describes a novel approach for the automatic generation and evaluation of a trivial dialogue phrases database. A trivial dialogue phrase is defined as an expression used by a chatbot program as the answer of a user input. A transfer-like genetic algorithm (GA) method is used to generating the trivial dialogue phrases for the creation of a natural language generation (NLG) knowledge base. The automatic evaluation of a generated phrase is performed by producing n-grams and retrieving their frequencies from the World Wide Web (WWW). Preliminary experiments show very positive results.