In the context of increasingly busy lives and mobility constraints, we present a unified space-time approach to support flexible personal scheduling. We distill an analysis of the design requirements of interactive space-time scheduling into a single coherent workflow where users can manipulate a rich vocabulary of spatio-temporal parameters, and plan/explore itineraries that satisfy or optimize the resulting space-time constraints. We demonstrate our approach using a proof-of-concept mobile application that enables exploration of the inter-connected continuum between task scheduling (temporal), and multi-destination route mapping (spatial). We evaluate the application with a user study involving an itinerary reproduction task and a free-form planning task. We also provide usage scenarios illustrating the potential of our approach in various contexts and tasks. Results suggest that our approach fills an important gap between route mapping and calendar scheduling, suggesting a new research direction in personal planning interface design.

Building on game design and education research, this paper introduces narrative-focused role-playing games as a way to promote visualization literacy in young children. Visualization literacy skills are vital in understanding the world around us and constructing meaningful visualizations, yet, how to better develop these skills at an early age remains largely overlooked and understudied. Only recently has the visualization community started to fill this gap, resulting in preliminary studies and development of educational tools for use in early education. We add to these efforts through the exploration of gamification to support learning, and identify an opportunity to apply role-playing game-based designs by leveraging the presence of narratives in data-related problems involving visualizations. We study the effects of including narrative elements on learning through a technology probe, grounded in a set of design considerations stemming from visualization, game design and education science. We create two versions of a game - one with narrative elements and one without - and evaluate our instances on 33 child participants between 11- to 13-years old using a between-subjects study design. Despite participants requiring double the amount of time to complete their game due to additional narrative elements, the inclusion of such elements were found to improve engagement without sacrificing learning; our results indicate no significant differences in development of graph-reading skills, but significant differences in engagement and overall enjoyment of the game. We report observations and qualitative feedback collected, and note areas for improvement and room for future work.

An exam wrapper is a structured activity that students engage in after their instructor has graded and returned an exam, and is designed to promote self-reflection and improve study practices. This paper describes two studies examining the efficacy and student perceptions of exam wrappers. The studies were conducted at two major Canadian universities, using complementary research designs. We report that neither study produced evidence that exam wrappers have a significant effect on final exam scores or on course drop rates. However, we also find that the use of wrappers was associated with improved rates of test pickup and increased scores on a course evaluation question regarding the fairness of evaluation methods. Given these results, we advise instructors who are considering the use of exam wrappers to review the evidence for other possible interventions that may more effectively serve the same goals.