CS education should help students acquire programming skills and technical knowledge, while also learning to collaborate, listen, and articulate their viewpoints in teams. These abilities are essential for professional development and teamwork. In human-computer interaction courses, teamwork is crucial for product design and development, and diverse user perspectives underpin the understanding and improvement of user experience. Traditional teaching often relies on spontaneous interaction in group projects, which depends heavily on whether a team includes members with strong organizational skills. To help all students engage with peers' perspectives and prepare for subsequent projects, we designed a reflective learning activity that combines structured diary study with group discussions. Students first recorded their experiences with a designated application over two weeks to deepen understanding of user needs and interaction contexts. They then shared their thoughts in group discussions, linking individual reflection with collective exchange to broaden recognition of diverse viewpoints. This study invited 10 CS undergraduates. Results showed that students gave strong positive evaluations, reporting that the activity improved their understanding of collaboration and increased confidence in expressing and listening within groups. Many also believed that if they continued to work with their group members to develop new features or software, the diary and discussion experience would give them greater confidence and smoother collaboration. This study demonstrates the potential of combining diaries and group discussions as a feasible approach for computing education to foster collaboration and support student voice.

Trail management is a complex, distributed endeavor that requires coordination among conservancies, government agencies, and local trail clubs to ensure visitor safety, environmental stewardship, and the protection of historical resources. Despite its importance, there has been limited systematic research on understanding or supporting the collaborative workflows that sustain this work. To help bridge this gap, we conducted interviews with 10 trail managers involved in or familiar with field operations across five major U.S. long-distance trails. A thematic analysis of the transcripts reveals that trail management spans a wide array of responsibilities, including volunteer coordination, resource allocation, hazard sense-making, and on-the-ground fieldwork. We identify institutional inefficiencies that surface during four distinct stages of the temporal collaborative sense-making process as managers interpret and act upon hiker-submitted reports of trail hazards. We conclude by outlining design implications for field reporting and decision-support systems that better align with the realities of volunteer-based, resource-constrained trail organizations, supporting more timely and coordinated action across distributed stakeholders.

Published version

With the rapid advancement and widespread adoption of computer technology, it has become an indispensable component in the development of human society. Therefore, computer science education's focus extends beyond merely teaching students to read and write code; it is crucial to assist them in gaining an accurate and deep understanding of the applications of technology in the real world, its conveniences, and potential risks. Furthermore, it involves exploring how to design, improve, and innovate computer technologies to meet practical demands. Consequently, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has grown increasingly significant in the curriculum of computer science. However, research indicates that computing students face numerous challenges in learning HCI. To enhance students' ability to experience, discover, and understand user needs, the authors of this paper recommend incorporating diary studies in HCI education. In the field of HCI, diary studies are a method for collecting long-term data on user behavior and experiences in a natural environment. Participants are required to record their daily activities, product usage, encountered issues, and personal impressions over specific periods. This paper will detail the process and steps implemented in our diary studies and present student feedback and evaluations. Through this experience report, we hope to encourage more educators to adopt and refine the diary study methodology in their courses, thereby aiding computer science students in better understanding and embracing the concepts and knowledge of HCI.

Maintaining emotional connections and fostering meaningful communication among distant family members has long been challenging. Existing communication technologies, such as instant messaging, video-sharing, and social media enable quick exchanges but often lack mechanisms to initiate appropriate conversation topics and support in-depth emotional interactions. This study explores the use of digital diary-sharing in addressing these limitations. We conduct thematic analyses on diaries from a three-week study (N=22) using DailyBean, a diary app, to examine frequent patterns in users' sharing of outdoor experiences with distant family members. We identify five key mechanisms to support connections between distant family members: topic initiation, memory recall, shared moments, joint activities, and future planning. We also highlight frequent conversation topics that facilitate emotional engagement and reflection for distant family members. We conclude our study with design recommendations for effective diary-based family communication.

This innovative practice paper introduces a novel approach that combines the automated assistant system, Pack-back, with computer ethics education to enhance the quality of educational outcomes in this field. As digital technology rapidly advances, it becomes imperative for educators in technology fields to prioritize ethical considerations. This priority stems from the potential risks associated with technological advancements and the necessity to ensure that these advancements positively impact society. In this context, deepening the understanding of the impacts of technology through computer ethics education is particularly crucial. This paper explores how automated assistant systems can be effectively integrated into computer ethics instruction through the application of Packback, an online educational platform. Packback stimulates students' curiosity and critical thinking by providing a question-and-answer-based learning environment, encouraging students to pose deep, insightful questions and explore answers with the help of their peers. The platform employs various automated text and language-based algorithms to facilitate discussions, enhance writing skills, and build critical thinking capacities. Compared to traditional teaching methods, our approach utilizes the capabilities of automated assistants and incorporates diary study methodology to emphasize reflective and interactive learning of course materials. We introduce three Packback assignments: Packback Discussion Questions, Packback Deep Dive, and Packback Diary Study. We found that most students have a positive attitude toward their overall experience through the comprehensive end-of-term questionnaire surveys. Feedback highlights that Packback has deepened their comprehension of computer ethics, offered a venue for reciprocal learning and exchange, and improved their ability to write arguments. However, some feedback also pointed out areas for improvement in the automated system, such as its over-reliance on the length of essays, which compels students to artificially expand brief sentences, thereby affecting the efficiency and quality of learning. Therefore, by summarizing feedback and experiences, we aim to provide valuable suggestions and practical cases for future integration of computer ethics education with automated assistant systems.

In this research-to-practice full paper, we describe our approach to using diary studies and social games to help Computer Science students develop their understanding of how application design influences user engagement and behavior over time. Social games are an engaging target for junior and senior-level courses like Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Mobile Software Design. While guidelines for designing social games can be conveyed through lectures and course materials, research shows the value of student-centered, hands-on learning experiences in fostering deep understanding. Inspired by Constructivism, which emphasizes that people construct understanding and knowledge through lived experiences and reflection, we incorporated a diary study assignment into an undergraduate HCI course. Although demoing a technology in class, or even having students use it in a controlled short-term activity, can convey lessons about usability, feature intent, and slips and errors, long-term use provides a better understanding of how technologies remain engaging and enjoyable (or how this can fade over time) and how social connections can evolve through repeated engagements. Diary studies, an established approach to field research, offer researchers a reflective view of how technology use may evolve over time. When employed as a pedagogical tool, diary studies create opportunities for students to capture and critically analyze their experiences through the lenses of a user, researcher, and designer. The social games served as a vehicle for active engagement, prompting students to apply critical thinking and reflection skills within a controlled setting. Analysis of students' diaries and post-study focus group discussions revealed common themes that can be incorporated into learning activities to help students understand how to develop apps that encourage certain behaviors among users. We outline how these lessons would be difficult to convey with more short-term use and identify techniques useful for development of social games. This diary study assignment approach increased students' appreciation of diary studies as a research method for collecting qualitative data about user behaviors and experiences over time and enhanced their understanding of the practical challenges of using diary studies for such a purpose. Further, we observed that the experience also deepened students' understanding of designing for user retention and social connection, and the importance of considering real-life application challenges in game design, such as concerns associated with safe usage and privacy.

Measuring instructors' adoption of learning management system (LMS) tools is a critical first step in evaluating the efficacy of online teaching and learning at scale. Existing models for LMS adoption are often qualitative, learner-centered, and difficult to leverage towards institutional support. We propose depth-of-use (DOU): an intuitive measurement model for faculty's utilization of a university-wide LMS and their needs for institutional support. We hypothesis-test the relationship between DOU and course attributes like modality, participation, logistics, and outcomes. In a large-scale analysis of metadata from 30000+ courses offered at Virginia Tech over two years, we find that a pervasive need for scale, interoperability and ubiquitous access drives LMS adoption by university instructors. We then demonstrate how DOU can help faculty members identify the opportunity-cost of transition from legacy apps to LMS tools. We also describe how DOU can help instructional designers and IT organizational leadership evaluate the impact of their support allocation, faculty development and LMS evangelism initiatives.

Technology has provided an environment for connecting indigenous community members and provide a means for them to seek and engage with their indigenous knowledge (IK). Emerging research has examined the effects of social media on specific IK, including the possibility of undermining community agency. In this work, we contrast how indigenous community members engage with IK offline, and in their own self-organized communities online. Through interviews with community members and a study of Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, we seek to better understand these practices and elicit design recommendations. Our findings describe how community roles have shifted in the presence of technology, notably with absence of elders and the inclusion of “born towns”–community members who live in non-traditional settings. We also find that fluency in the indigenous language served both as a gatekeeper: guarding the community knowledge, while also facilitating discussion surrounding different aspects of IK.

Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) is an adventure of a lifetime that necessitates long-term planning and knowledge of challenges and practices in the outdoors. One important but oft-ignored step is to establish awareness about sustainable practices captured in Leave No Trace (LNT) principles for minimizing the impact on the trail. This paper seeks to understand practices of hikers with regards to trail sustainability and LNT. Since hikers often leverage virtual communities on social media for asking questions and sharing resources, we analyzed Reddit top-level comments on /r/AppalachianTrail to understand AT hiking discussions and explore their connections with sustainable practices in the outdoors. The findings will inform AT stakeholders and researchers in the field about the hikers’ practices and the role of social media platforms in supporting sustainable trail management.

This paper details our collaborative approach in capturing a holistic understanding of parental technology use through an assets-based framework. We steer the focus away from the design of technology as the central force of technological innovation, and instead support participants to reflect and describe intimate details that highlight specific use-contexts of technology in their lives. We leverage a group of foreign graduate student mothers' self-described unique strengths to gain an in-depth account of their lived experiences with technology. As research participants and co-authors, our collaborators elicit intimate narratives about meaningful events in their lives, bringing social and cultural aspects of their lived experience to the forefront, and thus providing broader context of their use of technology. We detail and reflect upon our approach of promoting user agency by creating an affinity group, fostering a safe and intimate space for research engagement, and describe the implications of using our adapted research methodology in intimate settings. We conclude by highlighting the various ways in which technology facilitates foreign student parenting, as well as the ways in which it serves as a temporary band-aid solution, prompting consideration of larger social issues.

Technology use by long-distance hikers provide a fascinating glimpse of the future of HCI research, as it intersects with technology isolation and (non)use. We can understand the use of technology, explore opportunities for rural and outdoor computing, and work with underrepresented communities in these spaces to amplify their stories. In this paper, we focus on the thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail and the stories they share on Instagram. We apply narrative analysis to understand the story content, and also leverage a News Value framework to describe how they craft their stories. The findings highlight opportunities to understand the different storytelling categories that thru-hikers employ, and the platforms they choose for the telling. We discuss the usefulness of understanding technology and storytelling needs for each type of storyteller, and explore the implications for designing technology and tools to amplify stories from underserved users and to support the telling of compelling stories.

Privacy policy and term agreement documents are considered the gateway for software adoption and use. The documents provide a means for the provider to outline expectations of the software use, and also provide an often-separate document outlining how user data is collected, stored, and used--including if it is shared with other parties. A user agreeing with the terms, assumes that they have a full understanding the terms of the agreement and have provided consent. Often however, users do not read the documents because they are long and full of legalistic and inconsistent language, are regularly amended, and may not disclose all the details on what is done to the user data. Enforcing compliance and ensuring user consent have been persistent challenges to policy makers and privacy researchers. This design fiction puts forward an alternate reality and presents a policy-based approach to fording the consent gap with the TL;DR Charter: an agreement governing the parties involved by harnessing the power of formal governments, industry, and other stakeholders, and taking users expectation of privacy into account. The Charter allows us as researchers to examine the implications on trust, decision-making, consent, accountability and the impact of future technologies.

Pokémon GO is a popular location-based mobile game that seeks to inspire players to be more active, socialize physically and virtually, and spend more time outside. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, several game mechanics of Pokémon GO were changed to accommodate socially-distanced play. This research aims to understand the impacts of the pandemic and subsequent game adjustments on user perceptions of the game. We used an exploratory mixed-method approach, a machine learning technique (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) for topic modeling, and thematic analysis for qualitative coding of top-level Reddit comments to identify whether and how the social distancing approach changes the players' behaviors. The results demonstrate that players were less physically active, less eager to discover, and more interested in remote social practices. We discuss which players leverage social distancing changes and reflect on key game features that provide a better gaming experience in the age of remote play.

The popularity of mobile devices for learning outside conventional classrooms necessitates the exploration of the many challenges which can impede the learning process for children using them. Key among these is the possibility of disorientation, occurring when children are faced with stimuli external to their learning task which can redirect their attention elsewhere. This paper explores the several factors which can contribute towards disorienting children from their learning task in an informal learning environment (ILE) using science festivals as a context. We detail the design and deployment of a mobile leaf identification application used by attendees at a child-focused science festival in a setting filled with distractions. Participating children used the app to watch an educational video about leaves, and were asked to identify the leaves around the exhibit correctly by taking a picture using the app. From our observations, we derive the key factors which can disorient young learners in an ILE and the ones which help them reorient towards the learning task. We conclude by providing considerations for designing mobile applications for children to be used in ILEs which can promote informal learning while minimizing disorientation.

Children in international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US often learn and speak more than one language. Challenges can arise for these children in terms of communicating with other children and being able to fully participate in school and society using the primary country language, in developing relationships with distant relatives in other languages, and with the lack of opportunities for practising additional languages within a small community of speakers. Recent research shows that some parents use screen media content to acquaint their children with their parent’s native language, and to also help them become proficient in the language of communication in the country that they reside in. We leverage the qualities of screen media in aiding children with language learning, and try to translate those qualities into the design of a CUI for children to explore the potential of designing conversational user interfaces which can double as assistive language aids. By reviewing the relevant literature about the role of screen media content in young children’s language learning, and interviewing a subset of parents raising multilingual children, we present a preliminary list of objectives to guide the design of conversational user interfaces for young children’s bilingual language acquisition.

Trust in a recommendation system (RS) is often algorithmically incorporated using implicit or explicit feedback of user-perceived trustworthy social neighbors, and evaluated using user-reported trustworthiness of recommended items. However, real-life recommendation settings can feature group disparities in trust, power, and prerogatives. Our study examines a complementary view of trust which relies on the editorial power relationships and attitudes of all stakeholders in the RS application domain. We devise a simple, first-principles metric of editorial authority, i.e., user preferences for recommendation sourcing, veto power, and incorporating user feedback, such that one RS user group confers trust upon another by ceding or assigning editorial authority. In a mixed-methods study at Virginia Tech, we surveyed faculty, teaching assistants, and students about their preferences of editorial authority, and hypothesis-tested its relationship with trust in algorithms for a hypothetical ‘Suggested Readings’ RS. We discover that higher RS editorial authority assigned to students is linked to the relative trust the course staff allocates to RS algorithm and students. We also observe that course staff favors higher control for the RS algorithm in sourcing and updating the recommendations long-term. Using content analysis, we discuss frequent staff-recommended student editorial roles and highlight their frequent rationales, such as perceived expertise, scaling the learning environment, professional curriculum needs, and learner disengagement. We argue that our analyses highlight critical user preferences to help detect editorial power asymmetry and identify RS use-cases for supporting teaching and research.

The struggle to thrive as a productive student researcher, an attentive parent, and a caring partner can be difficult, particularly for international student parents who are far from home and also possibly burdened with complex cultural expectations, interpersonal dynamics, and institutional biases. Using uses and gratifications theory as a framing mechanism, we describe interviews with twelve international student mothers in the United States who are primary caregivers of children between six months to five years old, focusing on the context of their use of screen media content and devices, the gratifications they seek from their children's use of screen media devices, and the differences in their perceptions about the use of screen media as an educated, non-US parent. Our findings give an initial account of the role of screen based technology in their domestic life with young children, and the limitations of their technological experience. We present four opportunities for designing for this population including technologies for positive distraction, interactive language aids, playful acquaintance tools, and anonymous peer networks for parent support. We conclude by formulating future promising avenues of research in this design space.

YouTube is not only a platform for content creators to share videos but also a virtual venue for hosting community activities, such as social media campaigns (SMCs). SMCs for public awareness is a growing and reoccurring phenomenon on YouTube, during which content creators make videos to engage their audience and raise awareness of global challenges. However, how the unique celebrity culture on YouTube affects collective actions is an underexplored area. This work examines an SMC on YouTube, #TeamTrees, initiated by a YouTube celebrity and sought to raise people's awareness of tree-planting and climate change. The authors annotated and analyzed 992 #TeamTrees videos to explore how YouTube celebrities, professionals, and amateurs in different channel topics diagnose problems, present solutions, and motivate actions. This study also looks into whether platform identities and framing activities affect campaign reach and engagement. Results suggest that #TeamTrees reached creators who are generally not active in social issues. The participating YouTubers were likely to motivate the viewers to donate and join celebrities' and community's actions, but less involved in examining the environmental problems. Celebrities' videos dominated the campaign's influence. Amateurs' videos had a higher engagement level, although they need more support to frame campaign activities. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications for video-sharing platforms to support future SMCs.

Emerging research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has considered the use of technology to preserve Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) while wrestling with the dilemma of local participation in the face of post-colonialism. There remains a need to understand how ICH is portrayed by museums and texts, how communities regard these representations, and how technology would affect preservation. We conducted a study in the North Rift region of Kenya to understand how ICH is preserved and disseminated by the museum in comparison with the community. The findings describe a respectful technology space where community needs and museum needs can co-exist. We also articulate social challenges that should be considered by designers when recommending or designing technological solutions. This paper concludes by recommending ways for researchers to smoothly integrate technology with ICH through community participation and an awareness of the respectful space.

A months-long hike of the Appalachian Trail often involve long-term preparation and life-altering decisions. Would-be hikers leverage institutional knowledge from literature and online forums to physically and mentally prepare for such an arduous hike. Their use of social platforms provide useful insights on motivations for undertaking the thru-hike, how they deal with unexpected conditions on the trail and understand choices made in conditions of scarcity. By analyzing over 100,000 Reddit posts and comments in r/AppalachianTrail and applying a Sense of Community theory, we sought to understand hikers' identity as community members, how their emotional and practical needs are met, and how they evolve. We found that the role and language of thru-hikers change as they progress from pre-hike, on-hike, and post-hike stages, from a questioner early on, to an expert post-hike. We conclude with design recommendations to support offline communities online.

Advances in the fields of natural language processing, machine learning and speech recognition have led to the increasing adoption of conversational agents in a variety of domains. However, the use of conversational agents as a childcare assistant for parents of young children has not been realized. We propose the use of conversational agents into children's programs to produce an interactive show, which can be employed as conversational companion for children, and a childcare assistant for parents of young children who have limited access to childcare options. Key features of the interactive show include understanding, responsiveness and maintaining an uninterrupted conversation flow. We argue that having a truly interactive show can engage children for a longer period of time without being distracted, which can give parents some time to attend to their needs in the absence of help.

Learning management system (LMS) tools are increasingly relevant to scaling computing pedagogies. Measuring their utilization and impact at scale, however, remains computationally expensive. We examine the problem of estimating the utilization of a department-wide LMS, and its impact on the design, management and outcomes of Computer Science courses. We introduce 'depth-of-use' (DOU): a first-principles, resource-specific metric of LMS utilization. We then hypothesis-test the relationship between DOU and course attributes like modality (course level, mode-of-delivery, third-party app use), participation (enrollment, viewership), logistics (teaching support, digital skills training) and outcomes (average GPA, DFW rate). Experiments on metadata from over 1300 Computer Science courses taught at Virginia Tech between 2015 and 2019 suggest that our framing of DOU helps identify resource-level preferences of micro-cohorts of courses, linked to their content, logistics and pedagogies. We discover that, across the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech, overall LMS use is consistently linked to favorable learning outcomes. We also discover that a complex interaction between the needs for scale, ubiquitous access and interoperability drives strong LMS utilization, with graduate and online-only courses faring highest in their aggregate use of LMS services. Finally, we describe two key applications of our analyses. One, we demonstrate how DOU can help CS faculty identify the relative impact of transition from legacy apps to LMS services. Two, we describe how DOU can help instructional designers evaluate and improve their design interventions.

Multiple-display environments (MDEs) have promise in helping co-located sensemaking tasks by supporting searching, organizing, and discussion tasks. Co-located sensemaking occurs when two or more sensemakers forage for useful information within a dataset, creating and leveraging knowledge structures individually and together. Group territories in MDEs support communicating and assembling findings, but questions remain regarding how to best represent individual sensemaking efforts in the group territory to support the sensemaking collaboration. This paper empirically examines exploration of a large Twitter dataset using three group territory paradigms: parallel, connected, and merged. Results reveal that merging group work increases task complexity while separating individuals' sections in the group territory supports monitoring, and more interactions are performed when individual work is not connected in the group territory.

Physical inactivity is a global public health concern. Community-based interventions that use strategies such as competition and cooperation, with group dynamics-based strategies at their core, are effective at improving individual physical activity behaviors, but they often rely on participants to actively seek out fitness information themselves. This work examines how technologies such as smartwatches that are designed to raise awareness of personal and group fitness can encourage positive fitness behavior within and across peer groups. This paper presents a study about smartwatch use by 27 people as part of an 8- week community physical activity intervention program with elements of competition and cooperation, seeking to understand fitness awareness and behavior of the participants. Results indicate generally high awareness levels of smartwatch information. In particular, members of most successful groups exhibited significantly higher awareness for feedback displayed on the smartwatch.

The Technology on the Trail workshop will examine the encroachment of technology into hiking and outdoor adventures, with a focus on identifying and developing ways for technology to support positive and mutually beneficial connections among people. These connections include both intentional ones helpful in collecting scientific data, supporting the environment, maintaining safety, and sharing via social media. We will also explore more opportunistic connections, such as those that are leveraged when tracking and sharing biometric or geotemporal data. With the inclusion of technology in places where it is not used and sometimes not welcome, there will be mismatches of ethics and values that must be considered in the design and use of technology. The workshop will examine existing and emerging challenges of bringing technology onto the trail and reflect on ways to understand, design, and deploy appropriate technological solutions moving forward.

As mobile software development becomes more mainstream, universities recognize a need to integrate mobile platform programming into the curriculum. This integration requires an understanding of mobile software development that defines it not just as a collection of topics but that acknowledges cross-topic areas that serve as the basis for specific interests. This paper presents a platform-agnostic model for teaching mobile software development that identifies established foundational topics, offering an adaptable teaching model aimed at providing enhanced understating of the topics and their integration. The model identifies three core areas of importance to computer science education: asynchronous programming, model view controller, and platform underpinnings. This framework enables mobile-specific topics like location, notifications, sensors, and more that are positioned with respect to the core areas to assist with lecture and assignment planning. Testing this model showed that students exhibited better skills and knowledge of both the core concepts and the specific topics as observed in their integration of features in term projects. This suggests that, through emphasis on core areas and repeated exposure to them in the context of new topics, students exhibit higher quality of integration of various mobile topics and deeper understand of the core-cross topic areas for mobile software development. Next steps are adoption by the education community in project-based mobile development classes of various format, scope, level, and purpose.

Groupwork is core to the educational process at all levels, with peer learning activities demonstrated to be an important component in exploring new idea spaces. Recent advances in technology encourage a re-examination of ways that technology can support and expand groupwork. This paper examines how large multi-touch tabletop displays can be used by students in group information exploration, creation, and sharing situations. The multi-user, multi-touch features enable multiple people to transition between individual and group interactions with the display, rather than the turn-taking interactions common in older technologies. While this provides opportunities, it also presents challenges in the ways that activities for the shared space are crafted, executed, and evaluated. This paper describes how our software solutions encourage idea exchange, sharing, and awareness of the activities of others, toward crafting better artifact-centered educational experiences. Specifically, the paper describes three techniques for card-based explorations that help enable groupwork: semantic zoom, dynamic grouping and info glow. Semantic zoom considers how pinch zooming can vary not only artifact size but also artifact content, showing more information at larger sizes. Dynamic grouping features the card combination which facilitates idea generation and synthesization. Info glow highlights artifacts that have been recently accessed or changed, providing an enduring way to see modifications made by others. This paper explores usage of this environment and these techniques, focusing on their impacts on educational goals and objectives for K-8 and for undergraduates, to understand how students in pairs or triads work independently and together as they explore and create within information spaces. Results suggest that older students tend to engage more with each other, though students of all ages transition between quiet individual work and communicative group work. The techniques described in this paper inform ways that they can be configured to optimize idea exchange, sharing, and awareness, and ways that tools and classroom techniques can encourage a more dynamic and engaged learning environment.

Research suggests that different teaching styles and multiple exposures of different styles to material can aid in the learning process. While there are guidelines for identifying the best teaching style for material, new and evolving areas can present unique challenges. The emerging area of mobile software development, which combines aspects of software, hardware, and interpersonal interaction, captures many such challenges; e.g., understanding how to develop for multiple screen sizes, designing for GPS time lag, dealing with unreliable sensor data. Teaching these challenging materials seemed well suited for multiple approaches that leveraged different learning styles. This paper examines three teaching approaches employed in ten teaching modules across two semesters of a mobile software development course. The approaches included lectures, interactive tutorials, and Pair Programming. Lectures were used to introduce topics and explore underlying theories of development. The lectures included time for questions from and for the students, but otherwise did not have an active learning component. Two active learning approaches used in the class were interactive tutorials and Pair Programming. Interactive tutorials presented applied development approaches, then explored their use in an individual-based hands-on demos. Pair Programming is an agile software development practice, used in both industry and education, which enforces a role-based approach to learning new programming concepts. Homeworks were used to assess learning, and surveys reflected student satisfaction. Results show areas of promise and of concern with regard to the learning styles. It seems that repetition of topics is important for mastery of the topics. Foundational theories seem well suited for lectures, while programming concepts work better in active learning situations. Additional learning took place through office hours, online question forums, and individual and group online exploration. The findings suggest specific approaches to teaching challenging and unique mobile software development topics as well as a general approach to identifying ways to distribute learning objectives across lectures, interactive tutorials, and Pair Programming sessions.

Due to the popularity of mobile devices, it is important to teach mobile computing and security to students in colleges and universities. This paper describes eight course modules on mobile computing and security we developed that could be integrated into a computer science curriculum. These course modules were presented at a faculty workshop. Workshop evaluation includes a survey questionnaire and reflective narratives from participants. The workshop evaluation results are discussed in this paper. The course modules can be adopted by instructors teaching mobile application development, cyber security or other related courses.

Pair Programming has demonstrated benefits for education, but unique concerns of mobile software design raise questions about the effectiveness of Pair Programming in this evolving field. This paper probes unique challenges for Pair Programming when used in mobile software design classes, focusing on five mobile design topics: dealing with interface and data management, using camera, handling multi-device connectivity, using sensors and collecting GPS data, and using microphones and speakers. The paper highlights successes and challenges for Pair Programming and mobile applications, concluding with recommendations on building assignments, managing student interaction, and implementing Pair Programming for instructors considering using it in their mobile development classes.

Smartwatches are emerging as wrist-based computers capable of complex calculation and communication, and the computer science curriculum should reflect the challenges and opportunities that they provide in the education domain. This paper puts forth an experience report focused on efforts to incorporate smartwatches in an upper-level undergraduate mobile application development class during two academic terms. Lectures, in-class activities, homeworks, and projects were tailored toward providing rich design and implementation experiences for the students that engaged them in developing for the smartwatch and a paired mobile device. Our experiences highlighted how incorporating smartwatches into a mobile app development class adds a valuable dimension in terms of design and implementation challenges and allowed students to exercise some of the fundamental computer science topics.

This demo features smartwatch applications created by junior/senior CS students in a mobile development course. The course featured the Pebble smartwatch, with an e-ink display, vibrating motor, and accelerometer. Smartwatches enhance mobile device use by acting as a secondary display and providing immediate notifications, but designing for them has challenges in memory management, sensor programming, networking issues, and display size. Incorporating Pebble smartwatch development in a mobile app development class allowed students to exercise core computer science concepts to overcome Pebble hardware and software limitations and to develop applications that leverage Pebble affordances. Two sections of the class featured Pebble-focused assignments, including an open-ended homework, a focused homework, and a term design project coordinating smartphone-smartwatch use. The two-semester experience yielded apps in all Pebble-defined categories, including tools and utilities, notifications, remotes, health and fitness, and games. Examples of the students' work from each of the categories will be presented in this demo on topics such as music synthesizing, remote camera operation, course management alerts, and server management. The presented apps reflect student understanding of the sensor functionalities, hardware capabilities and limitations, and interactions of the phone-watch pair. This demo will serve as a valuable resource for those who plan to incorporate smartwatch development into their teaching practice. Based on the educational experience gleaned, future opportunities can explore the role of the smartwatch in mobile development and programming education for college and K-12 students.

This paper describes a reflective mobile application to help young people with ADD and ADHD better understand their engagement levels during their daily tasks. The mobile application, paired with an electroencephalographic (EEG) device, collects data about user-specific task engagement and pairs it with geographic and temporal data to provide insights into the degree to which a user is engaged in tasks based on time and location. The paper describes two mobile prototypes developed to investigate the problem space of contextual visualizations of engagement information, and it presents future directions for development and study.

Tongue-computer interaction techniques create a new pathway between the human and the computer, with particular utility for people with upper limb impairment. This study investigated the usability problems of camera-based tongue computer interface reflected through the user behavior and participants' feedback; specifically the exploration of referential techniques to make users aware of their tongue position and help adjust their gesture. Pros and cons of the referential strategies are discussed to foster future assistive tongue-computer interface design.

People with cognitive disabilities that affect their memory, attention, and comprehension can become overwhelmed when using technology---just as cognitively-demanding situations like driving or multitasking can hinder technology use for most people. However, appropriately-designed technology can assist in overcoming cognitive disabilities and cognitive limitations. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners with design experience in the many areas of cognitive disability and cognitive limitation to exchange, evolve, and develop strategies for design. Workshop participants will present key lessons from their own experiences, and workshop activities will employ claims-based design strategies toward identifying, comparing, and mapping approaches for addressing cognitive disabilities and limitations.

People with cognitive disabilities need careful matching to find appropriate employment. However, it can be difficult for them to articulate their worries and concerns in a timely and useful manner. This work demonstrates how appropriately-designed technology can assist in accommodating cognitive disabilities, providing avenues to assess their concerns about work environments. A mobile application was developed with targeted repeated multimedia surveying to assess work concerns, with temporal- and geo-tagged answers stored for review by a personal assistant, employer, job coach, or person with a cognitive disability. An expert review provided feedback to ensure an appropriate application.

Storyboards offer designers a way to illustrate a narrative. Their creation can be enabled by tools supporting sketching or widget collections. As designers often incorporate previous ideas, we contribute the notion of blending the reappropriation of artifacts and their design tradeoffs with storyboarding. We present PIC-UP, a storyboarding tool supporting reappropriation, and report on two studies--a long-term investigation with novices and interviews with experts. We discuss how it may support design thinking, tailor to different expertise levels, facilitate reappropriation during storyboarding, and assist with communication.

Artifacts can be used to inspire, guide, and create new designs. As approaches to design can range from focusing on inspiration to formalized reasoning, we seek to create and study artifacts that combine the use of images and rationale. In this paper, we contribute an understanding of the relationship between imagery and rationale through an investigation of an artifact made of both. Through a study of group design sessions, we find images can provide access to rationale, moments of inspiration can be balanced with rationale, and differences between images and rationale must be reconciled. We conclude with thoughts on how such artifacts might be leveraged by the design community.

Designing CSCW systems that support the widely varying needs of targeted users is difficult. There is no silver bullet technology that enables users to effectively collaborate with one another in different contexts. We propose a method of collaborative systems evaluation that enables novice evaluators to make insightful observations about the systems they evaluate at a level comparable to experts in certain situations. These observations come in the form of a categorical breakdown analysis of a laboratory study. The quantity and type of breakdowns can then be connected to recommended CSCW tools and features developed and described in the related literature. We conducted a study to explore the results generated when the method was applied by both experts and novices in the field of CSCW. We observed that experts found the method to be usable, and that novices capitalized on the knowledge embodied in the breakdown categories to make categorizations similar to those of experts.

We explore some of the characteristics of multimodal input interaction spaces for notification systems within a multi-tasking environment like a command and control center using two promising interaction methods: gestures and touch based input through a laboratory experiment comparing both techniques. Results of our study suggest that gestures are better suited for multi-tasking situations because they are less interruptive than touch interaction to users' primary tasks and are subjectively preferred by users in certain situations.

Device-assisted navigation is rapidly becoming a major topic in computer science. PDAs and other small devices are enabling the introduction of navigational assistants to many different spaces. These areas are generally filled with points of interest with which users may choose to interact with. The natural behavior of users in such a space is to explore, interacting with objects the user deems worthy of further interaction. We call this behavior 'opportunistic navigation.' In this paper we define the challenges associated with and put forward several criteria for enabling opportunistic navigation in location-based notification systems. Our criteria have been implemented in the form of a prototype navigational assistant, SeeVT-ART, and have undergone a preliminary field test.

Many software systems fail to address their intended purpose because of a lack of user involvement and requirements deficiencies. This paper discusses the elaboration of a requirements-analysis process that integrates a critical-parameter-based approach to task modeling within a user-centric design framework. On one hand, adapting task models to capture requirements bridges the gap between scenarios and critical parameters which benefits design from the standpoint of user involvement and accurate requirements. On the other hand, using task models as a reusable component leverages requirements reuse which benefits design by increasing quality while simultaneously reducing development costs and time-to-market. First, we present the establishment of both a user-centric and reuse-centric requirements process along with its implementation within an integrated design tool suite. Secondly, we report the design, procedures, and findings of two user studies aimed at assessing the feasibility for novice designers to conduct the process as well as evaluating the resulting benefits upon requirements-analysis deliverables, requirements quality, and requirements reuse.

Map usage on handheld devices suffers from limited screen size and the minimal attention that users can dedicate to them in mobile situations. This work examines effects of automating navigation features like zooming and panning as well as other features such as rotation, path finding and artifact representation on the mobile navigation experience. Described are five claims and early support for these features in the police work domain.

Our research investigates notification qualities of different types of voices, moving toward interfaces that support optimal allocation of attention to maximize system utility. We conducted an experiment to determine the interruption, reaction, and comprehension values of three different voice categories: the user's voice, a familiar voice, and an unfamiliar voice. Initial testing showed significant and impactful results: unfamiliar voices are the least interruptive, and a user reacts most quickly to one's own voice. Motivated by these findings, we report on the development and deployment of a notification system that exploits the differences in familiarity of a voice.

This work seeks to strengthen interaction within a research community through a centrally-located physical device that presents online presence information in a semi-public space. The device uses a map metaphor to represent a set of connected labs. As people move within the lab, those who wish to interact with lab users can use the display to guide their interaction approaches, by supporting educated guesses as to arrivals, departures, and work patterns. The paper reports on the lessons learned about the device's characteristics, and provides anecdotes and observations on ways in which this type of device can improve communication and enhance community.

This paper describes a heuristic creation process based on the notion of critical parameters, and a comparison experiment that demonstrates the utility of heuristics created for a specific system class. We focus on two examples of using the newly created heuristics to illustrate the utility of the usability evaluation method, as well as to provide support for the creation process, and we report on successes and frustrations of two classes of users, novice evaluators and domain experts, who identified usability problems with the new heuristics. We argue that establishing critical parameters for other domains will support efforts in creating tailored evaluation tools.

We elaborate a proposal for capturing, extending, and reusing design knowledge gleaned through usability testing. The proposal is specifically targeted to address interface design for notification systems, but its themes can be generalized to any constrained and well-defined genre of interactive system design. We reiterate arguments for and against using critical parameters to characterize user goals and usability artifacts. Responding to residual arguments, we suggest that clear advantages for research cohesion, design knowledge reuse, and HCI education are possible if several challenges are overcome. As a first step, we recommend a slight variation to the concept of a critical parameter, which would allow both abstract and concrete knowledge representation. With this concept, we demonstrate a feasible approach by introducing equations that elaborate and allow evolution of notification system critical parameters, which is made operational with a variety of usability evaluation instruments. A case study illustrates how one general instrument allowed system designs to be meaningfully compared and resulted in valuable inferences for interface reengineering. Broad implications and conclusions about this approach will be of interest to others concerned with using critical parameters in interface design, development of notification systems interfaces, or approaches to design rationale and knowledge reuse.

Reacting to challenges that have been observed in human-computer interaction (HCI) education, as well as the multidisciplinary design, science, and engineering underpinnings, we investigate a pedagogical approach based on case methods. Our study of various case method techniques in an undergraduate HCI class provides insights into challenges that can be expected in the employment of case methods, student learning outcomes, and considerations for HCI curriculum planning. In general, case methods show great promise with a wide variety of topics, and we present broad recommendations for future work that will improve integration of HCI professional practice, research, and education.

Many algorithm visualizations have been created, but little is known about which features are most important to their success. We believe that pedagogically useful visualizations exhibit certain features that hold across a wide range of visualization styles and content. We began our efforts to identify these features with a review that attempted to identify an initial set of candidates. We then ran two experiments that attempted to identify the effectiveness for a subset of features from the list. We identified a small number of features for algorithm visualizations that seem to have a significant impact on their pedagogical effectiveness, and found that several others appear to have little impact. The single most important feature studied is the ability to directly control the pace of the visualization. An algorithm visualization having a minimum of distracting features, and which focuses on the logical steps of an algorithm, appears to be best for procedural understanding of the algorithm. Providing a good example for the visualization to operate on proved significantly more effective than letting students construct their own data sets. Finally, a pseudocode display, a series of questions to guide exploration of the algorithm, or the ability to back up within the visualization did not show a significant effect on learning.

Classroom BRIDGE supports activity awareness by facilitating planning and goal revision in collaborative, project-based middle school science. It integrates large-screen and desktop views of project times to support incidental creation of awareness information through routine document transactions, integrated presentation of awareness information as part of workspace views, and public access to subgroup activity. It demonstrates and develops an object replication approach to integrating synchronous and asynchronous distributed work for a platform incorporating both desktop and large-screen devices. This paper describes an implementation of these concepts with preliminary evaluation data, using timeline-based user interfaces.

Addressing the need to tailor usability evaluation methods (UEMs) and promote effective reuse of HCI knowledge for computing activities undertaken in divided-attention situations, we present the foundations of a unifying model that can guide evaluation efforts for notification systems. Often implemented as ubiquitous systems or within a small portion of the traditional desktop, notification systems typically deliver information of interest in a parallel, multitasking approach, extraneous or supplemental to a user's attention priority. Such systems represent a difficult challenge to evaluate meaningfully. We introduce a design model of user goals based on blends of three critical parameters---interruption, reaction, and comprehension. Categorization possibilities form a logical, descriptive design space for notification systems, rooted in human information processing theory. This model allows conceptualization of distinct action models for at least eight classes of notification systems, which we describe and analyze with a human information processing model. System classification regions immediately suggest useful empirical and analytical evaluation metrics from related literature. We present a case study that demonstrates how these techniques can assist an evaluator in adapting traditional UEMs for notification and other multitasking systems. We explain why using the design model categorization scheme enabled us to generate evaluation results that are more relevant for the system redesign than the results of the original exploration done by the system's designers.

Understanding the high level structure of a software system is useful for determining the impact of proposed changes. We investigate techniques for recovering the high level structure, or software architecture, for cases in which no trusted architectural description exists. We then demonstrate how a scenario based approach to architectural evaluation can be used to document the impact of proposed changes on a software system. Architectural recovery and impact analysis are demonstrated using a case study comparing two graphical debuggers, xdbx and ups.