We investigate how to design community technologies for public events. We do so with a focus on technologies that give rise to new forms of participation and knowledge co-production in public libraries. Specifically, we deployed a digital service at a major public library during its four-week creative workshop series. The system offered an alternative way for people to work together as a community, to go beyond achieving individual goals, and to contribute to the achievement of public goals (e.g., building community bookshelves). We report on how the system has reconfigured physical spaces and afforded new social practices in the library. We propose Computational Alternatives as a fruitful approach for gaining situated, nuanced insights into a technology's possible adoption. We offer key insights in the form of computational alternatives vignettes -- grounded stories that encapsulate sociotechnical implications of technology, pointing to plausible alternative futures.

In this video submission, we describe a scenario developed in the EMOTE project. The overall goal of the EMOTE project is to develop an empathic robot tutor for 11-13 year old school students in an educational setting. The pedagogical domain here is to assist students in learning and testing their map-reading skills typically learned as part of the geography curriculum in schools. We show this scenario with a NAO robot interacting with the students whilst performing map-reading tasks on a touch-screen device in this video.

In this paper, we describe the results of an interview study conducted across several European countries on teachers' views on the use of empathic robotic tutors in the classroom. The main goals of the study were to elicit teachers' thoughts on the integration of the robotic tutors in the daily school practice, understanding the main roles that these robots could play and gather teachers' main concerns about this type of technology. Teachers' concerns were much related to the fairness of access to the technology, robustness of the robot in students' hands and disruption of other classroom activities. They saw a role for the tutor in acting as an engaging tool for all, preferably in groups, and gathering information about students' learning progress without taking over the teachers' responsibility for the actual assessment. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to teacher acceptance of ubiquitous technologies in general and robots in particular.