With the proliferation of affordable mass-market Virtual Reality (VR) technology, the interest in designing novel metaverse-related applications has increased rapidly. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) has gained attention as a complement to traditional approaches for treating phobias by offering an immersive experience under the control of a trained specialist. However, these treatments are pretty specific to the aversive stimulus that is being addressed (e.g., spiders), and the design of this kind of software requires addressing multiple viewpoints and concerns from different domains collaboratively. In this paper, we present the initial formalization of a reference architecture to support the development of VRET software, explicitly highlighting component reuse and system maintainability. We show the applicability of our proposal through a worked example illustrating the development of a specific VRET product for treating arachnophobia (i.e., intense fear of spiders) and how it can be modified to address other kinds of aversive stimuli. The proposed reference architecture was evaluated in a design workshop with a panel of experienced VR software designers and developers, exploring its pertinence, correctness, and completeness. Our results show that the proposed architecture is easy to follow and captures the critical domain-specific components (both psychology- and software-related) to produce potentially effective solutions, easing the collaborative effort in developing and maintaining VRET software.

Given the importance of the introductory programming course (CS1), the Computer Science Education community has devoted a significant effort to generate empirical evidence and propose tools, techniques, and curricular approaches to support students. For instance, Parsons Problems have emerged as one of the preferred scaffolding strategies to help CS1 students get a grasp on programming before being exposed to open write-code assignments. However, prior literature has not given enough attention to those students who fail CS1 and must retake the course. In this paper, we report the results of an exploratory case study aimed at understanding the effectiveness of Parsons Problems as an active scaffolding strategy delivered to CS1 retakers at the University of Chile. In this version of the course, although students were already introduced to computational thinking, program design, and coding (as they were taking CS1 for a second time), it was the first time they were exposed to Parsons Problems. We conducted a follow-up assessment of the students' perceptions throughout the course, employing a combination of focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and end-course surveys. Our results suggest that Parsons Problems are effective for learners beyond the ''novice programmer'' stage (such as the experience of CS1 retakers), highlighting good practices to support the studied group in terms of engagement, performance, and overall student experience.

Artificial Intelligence has rapidly captured-again-the attention of practitioners and the CS Education community. Several initiatives have been spawning to identify effective ways to introduce learners at college and high-school levels to the basics of AI. In this context, we developed Scratch-NB, an extension to the Scratch programming language to equip K-8 learners with foundational tools for developing a Naive-Bayes classifier, explicitly transparenting its internal components. We opted to use Scratch due to its popularity within the CS4All movement and its predominance in schools, and extend the language with a simple implementation of the Naive Bayes classifier as a gateway for introducing basic notions of supervised learning and AI. In this paper, we report the design rationale of our tool and our experience of using it in an informal workshop with children aged 10-12 with no prior knowledge of computational thinking, coding, or AI. The obtained results show that Scratch-NB showed high levels of acceptance among the participants, raised interest in AI, and effectively provided basic foundations, particularly when comparing Scratch-NB with other state-of-the-art tools targeted to this learner group. We argue that our tool has the potential to illuminate further practical and research endeavors when exploring how to effectively introduce younger populations to the foundational notions of AI in practical contexts.

Many novice programmers struggle to write code from scratch and get frustrated when their code does not work. Parsons problems can reduce the difficulty of a coding problem by providing mixed-up blocks that the learner assembles in the correct order. Parsons problems can also include distractor blocks that are not needed in a correct solution, but which may help students learn to recognize and fix errors. Evidence indicates that students find Parsons problems engaging, easier than writing code from scratch, useful for learning patterns, and typically faster to solve than writing code from scratch with equivalent learning gains. This working group leverages the work of the 2022 ITiCSE working group which published an extensive literature review of Parsons problems and designed and piloted several studies based on the gaps identified by the literature review. The 2023 working group is revising, conducting, and creating new studies. We will analyze the data from these multi-institutional and multi-national studies and publish the results as well as recommendations for future working groups.

Chile is a medium-sized developing country, with approximately 3,500,000 school-aged children. Computational thinking (CT) has been recognized as a tool for developing XXI century skills, but Chile has a large population of in-service teachers that do not know what CT is, limiting its application in classrooms. In response, the government has enacted a training program for in-service primary school teachers, focusing on changing their perceptions about CT, and showing them how it can be used in classroom. This training program was designed for grades 1-6 and piloted in the capital region during 2018. The program initially focused on coding activities, but was then redesigned to show how CT can be used to help meet the learning objectives of different subjects in the curriculum. The program was then scaled up nationwide. In this experience report, we discuss the outcomes of this program. The training program scaled as intended and we identified positive changes in teacher perceptions about CT, especially among female participants. We conclude with the lessons we learned from this experience.

Parents that homeschool their children ignore certain topics when they lack mastery or interest in them. Homeschool groups try to address this issue, cooperatively educating their children. We were contacted by such a group that wanted to introduce their children to computational thinking (CT). These children, aged 7-11, have showed an interest in technology, and use online educational resources. None of the parents felt capable of tutoring the group about CT. They also worried about losing control about how their children interact with technology. We report an intervention over 9 months to introduce eleven young homeschoolers to CT in a suburban environment, describing the impact on parent and children attitudes towards technology and CT. We conclude with three lessons: 1)~science-related activities should be used to introduce CT among homeschoolers, 2) "success'' is establishing a meaningful relationship with a homeschool group, and 3) activities designed for school children need to be adapted to the homeschooling context.

In Latin America, computational thinking workshops are mostly developed in urban areas, charging participation fees. And although teachers are increasingly being expected to include technology in their classrooms, computational thinking and programming are not mandatory topics in teacher training programs. This hinders the development of digital skills among Latino students, and we expect that the digital gap between urban and rural populations will expand over time, especially in socio-economically vulnerable populations. Believing that teachers can be agents of change, we designed a 12 hour workshop to train the K-8 teaching staff in a rural and vulnerable school. The goal of this experience was to help these teachers develop basic computational thinking skills and devise new ways to incorporate what they learned in their classrooms. In this paper, we report our experience facilitating this workshop, and analyze the teacher perceptions before and after the intervention. Teacher attitudes changed drastically during the execution of the workshop, and they were able to come up with creative ways of incorporating computational thinking activities into their subjects. The reported experience can be used as input to develop public policies with respect to how computational thinking should be introduced in rural and vulnerable environments.

Advancing computational thinking in elementary education has been rapidly gaining attention due to the prospective of developing 21st century skills. However, interventions in this domain risk failure if they do not explicitly address the particular socio-cultural traits of the deployment scenario. This is the case in most countries of Latin America, where computing has not reached a sustainable penetration in K-12 education. In order to bridge this gap, we designed a one-week workshop for advancing computational thinking targeted to 10-12 years old Chilean students with no prior experience in programming. This paper describes our intervention and presents the results of a qualitative study analyzing positive and negative aspects of the experience. Although most participants effectively acquired basic programming skills by the end of the intervention, we also identified several inaccurate views on computing and computer scientists. For instance, computing was mostly perceived as a set of informal experiences rather than a way for enabling creation, automation, and work. The word "hacking" appears to be used as a metaphor for more technical terms, such as "programming" or "algorithm". Finally, negative stereotypical views of computer scientists resulting from the intervention were not as frequent as initial perceptions. These results provide fresh evidence on how to design, adapt, and evaluate computational thinking interventions targeted to K-6 students in Latin America.

Most adult children take care of their parents as they become older. However, the way in which families articulate themselves to care for their older members depends on cultural and social factors, which are different across societies. Given these differences, the design of CSCW systems and related services to support informal elderly caregiving requires contextual understanding of the complex and diverse living experiences and needs of older adults. This paper presents a cross-generational study to better understand the cooperative nature of informal elderly caregiving in Chile and Argentina. The study results show that family members assume implicit roles to fulfill their duties, with practically no coordination and no visibility of the assumed commitments within the family network. This implies that the articulation of the elderly caregiving is inefficient, conflict prone, and unbalanced, where family members assume a separation of concerns based on gender and kinship relationship with the older adult.

Most related research about intra-family communication follows the reality of developed countries, where older adults can live independently from their families and are likely to embrace technology. Contrarily, in Chile and other Latin American countries, most older adults live close to their families, are usually dependent of the latter, and rarely use digital means to communicate. Through cross-generational interviews, we identified attitudes, agreements, and expectations that describe how middle class Chilean families, living in urban settlements, interact with their elders. The study findings indicate that the approach used by the adult children to take care of their parents produces a vicious circle that stresses out the former and limits the technology adoption of the latter. Therefore, new ways of interacting with the elderly are required and digital technology has the potential to produce this change.

Summary Personal security is an open problem in large cities. After several attempts to reduce violence and crime, there seems to be an agreement that preventive actions are the best way to address this problem. Trying to help deal with that challenge, this paper proposes a mobile collaborative application, named Personal Guardian, which is used by civilians while walking in urban areas. The application is focused on crime prevention and it implements participatory sensing to help people be aware of the risks that appear to exist in a certain place at a certain time. Based on that information, citizens can take appropriate and on‐time preventive actions. The system is supported by a human‐centric wireless sensor network, and it is complementary to the security solutions already used by public and private organizations. The system architecture and its main components are described, and the main requirements and design decisions are also discussed. A preliminary evaluation of the solution was conducted to determine its strengths and weaknesses in terms of quality of service. The obtained results indicate that the information feeding process is more relevant for end‐users than the unattended delivery of awareness information about their personal security. In addition, this former capability does not require to be adjusted to the end‐users' context. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

One of the main issues when developing distributed collaborative systems is to support synchronization processes. The Coupled Objects paradigm has emerged as a way to easily support these processes by dynamically coupling arbitrary user interface objects between heterogeneous applications. In this article we present an architecture for developing distributed collaborative applications using HTML5 and we show its usage through the design and implementation of a series of collaborative systems in different scenarios. The experience of developing and using this architecture has shown that it is easy to use, robust and has good performance.

Today, millions of users around the world log into Web platforms to participate in online communities. Some of these communities group people that interact frequently in a face-to-face manner, such as the community of a course or a neighborhood. These communities are partially virtual because their members interact through both, a physical and a virtual space. These partially virtual communities have particular features and needs, and to the best of our knowledge, there are no guidelines concerning their modeling and evolution. This paper addresses the challenge of supporting the design of partially virtual communities. In particular, the article proposes a conceptual model to help design these communities, based on a literature review, a previous field study and the authors' experience. This model is expected to help designers and community managers establish the basis for developing and maintaining sustainable communities in order to ensure a certain level of activity through time.