Artificial intelligence (AI) applied to education has emerged as a solution that promises to facilitate learning and boosts productivity by enabling access to personalized learning, increasing student motivation and engagement, and supporting metacognitive processes through immediate feedback. However, its implementation involves major challenges such as over reliance, decreased creativity, and increased distraction, possibly affecting the development of long-term skills. Additionally, the integration of artificial intelligence may widen the technological and socioeconomic gaps that affect access to the devices needed to use it. We propose FRANKI, a low-cost, single shared device providing personalized feedback to each student. Students can use FRANKI to submit a handwritten text and receive AI-generated feedback through a projector or a printed-out paper.

Physical computing can be used to teach students computer science concepts in a project-based learning environment. However, this approach can be challenging for novices, as it requires mastering electronics and coding skills simultaneously. This paper presents Boxy Board, a custom-designed physical computing kit aimed at novice students. Rooted in constructivist methodologies and cognitive load theory, Boxy Board aims to reduce cognitive barriers by removing electronic components (e.g., breadboards) while gradually introducing complexity, scaffolding electronic and coding concepts through a progressive disclosure approach. This paper outlines the design, prototyping, and implementation process of Boxy Board. We conducted a usability evaluation with sixth-grade students, using pre- and post- questionnaires and interviews. The study shows that Boxy Board is usable by children and that they enjoyed their experience with it. We provide recommendations for improvements, and we establish that it is possible to implement progressive disclosure successfully in a physical computing educational setting.

Several factors mediate students’ perception of computer science and technology, e.g. socioeconomic status, gender biases, stereotypes, misinformation and misconceptions. However, few studies have focused on how stereotypical views are spread and which external references influence students’ perceptions, especially in the Global South. We conducted an online survey in Chile to gather information on the influential factors and perceptions of students about computer science and technology. We found that students have few close role models in technological fields and a low to intermediate level of understanding about how they could use technology in the future. Regarding future interests, students may be influenced by their hobbies and social networks when choosing their field of study, and they perceive themselves as having skills different from those they associate with careers in these areas.

Online judges in programming courses allow students to improve their coding abilities and instructors to analyze student work and detect challenging topics. Although several online judge platforms are available, most are limited in that they cannot support a large number of students simultaneously working on an assignment during a fixed time period, or can only do so at a significant cost, making the use of such systems in developing countries non-viable. This paper presents Clearn, a new platform that is (1) cost-conscious, as we have focused on lowering costs, (2) student-led, as we have empowered students and teaching assistants to lead its development and maintenance, and (3) highly simultaneous, as it allows over 1,000 students to work simultaneously on a timed assignment. This paper presents the platform, as well as the lessons learned during its development and deployment, and its reception by the students.

Mobile devices, including activity trackers and smartwatches, can help older adults monitor health parameters passively and unobtrusively. Most user interactions with small devices consist of brief glances at the time or notifications. Consuming information from small displays poses challenges, which have been seldom studied from the perspective of older users. In this paper, we worked with older adults towards creating health data visualizations for them for small devices. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 30 older adults, in which we (1) conducted group discussions to understand participants’ opinions, (2) measured times taken to interpret health data visualizations with and without progress information, (3) measured how much information they could manage to see during brief glances. When data was visualized without progress indicators, participants took less time to understand the data and made fewer errors. Participants preferred health data visualizations that featured peaceful, and positive pictorial representations. We present design opportunities for older adults’ data visualizations in small devices.

Displaying the information collected by mobile health technologies remains a challenge, especially when considering representation of health data for older adults - i.e., where and how to display data captured by health devices. We focus on an underrepresented group in HCI research: older adults in the global south, specifically in Chile and Ecuador. We studied the opinions of a group of 18 older adults on health data representation through interviews and remote co-design practices, encouraging them to imagine representations of health data through a presentation of personal objects. They imagined representations of health data in analog formats, where contextual information would be included. Visualization designs can be integrated into objects that older adults use frequently or are close to them. This study contributes design ideas on representations of health data for older adults in the global south and reflections on how to engage this population in remote co-design activities.

Of all the countries that belong to OCDE, the Latin American countries have the highest levels of inequality. Chile is among them, with scores similar to Bolivia and Guatemala [10]. Also, the number of women living in poverty is higher than that of men [4]. Women’s economic context is essential for their families, as 90% of single-parent families are supported by women [12]. One way of achieving economic development may be choosing a career in technology, as tech jobs are among the highest-paid in the country [9]. Also, they are flexible, allowing women to balance work and family, and have been proven to promote social mobility and country economic growth [2, 7]. However, there is a well-known gender gap in technology; for example, only 24% of computer science students are women in Chile [9].

A common belief among students is that computing is a boring subject that lacks a connection to the real world. The first class (one 80-minute session) in an introductory computer science course may be an appropriate instance to combat such a belief. Previous studies have used coursewide interventions, e.g., games and physical/tangible devices to improve students’ motivation. However, although other approaches help motivate students, they may lack real-world context or have a high cost of deployment. This article proposes a novel real-world based approach to introduce programming concepts in the first class of the introductory computer science course. This approach, called Protobject based, is applicable to courses with over 100 students, has a low deployment entry barrier, requires low investment, and may be used creatively to implement different experiences. Furthermore, the Protobject-based approach has an equivalent motivational effect—at least in the short-term—to a Game-based approach even if it is entirely focused on the real world. The low requirements of the approach make it especially suitable for an 80-minute first class in an introductory computer science course. The Protobject-based approach has been preliminarily validated and compared to a pure game-based approach with a study with 376 participants, and we present the analysis of motivation questionnaires, a pre-test and post-test, and a homework assignment given to the students. We posit that more research into initiatives such as this one—that can show students how computer science can impact the real world around them—is warranted.

Prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has almost doubled in recent decades and commonly presents comorbidities and complications. T2DM is a multisystemic disease, requiring multidisciplinary treatment provided by teams working in a coordinated and collaborative manner. The application of social network analysis techniques in the healthcare domain has allowed researchers to analyze interaction between professionals and their roles inside care teams. We studied whether the structure of care teams, modeled as complex social networks, is associated with patient progression. For this, we illustrate a data-driven methodology and use existing social network analysis metrics and metrics proposed for this research. We analyzed appointment and HbA1c blood test result data from patients treated at three primary health care centers, representing six different practices. Patients with good metabolic control during the analyzed period were treated by teams that were more interactive, collaborative and multidisciplinary, whereas patients with worsening or unstable metabolic control were treated by teams with less collaboration and more continuity breakdowns. Results from the proposed metrics were consistent with the previous literature and reveal relevant aspects of collaboration and multidisciplinarity.

Informal caregivers take care of someone (usually a close family member) who suffers from a chronic illness. In this stressful situation, caregivers have a high risk of depression or loneliness, because their social network is weakened. Most existing proposals focus on helping caregivers fulfill caregiving tasks, instead of providing support for their mental wellbeing (e.g. identifying early stages of social isolation). We present a prototype ambient interface, called EmoTree, that makes communication frequency tangible by using a metaphor of a tree, and investigate user perception and motivation of use. People found Emotree to be interesting and enjoyable (78%), and useful (54%) unless the user does not suffer some type of problem (69%). Our preliminary results show the interface is easy to use and has an adequate representation of communication frequency. Our next step will make a second assessment with informal caregivers in their real context.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in creating applications that allow grandparents to communicate with grandchildren living at a distance, since the involvement of grandparents in the lives of grandchildren is important for both generations. Therefore, it is necessary to know the context of the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren and how they communicate. This article presents a proposal for SINCOM: a simple and intergenerational communication tool that includes the needs and communication preferences of those involved. The proposal has two main characteristics: allowing communication without parental involvement, and incorporating recreational activities to generate conversation topics. These findings help in the development of a functional and complete application that can be evaluated with more users.

The recent growth of social networking and sensing applications has enabled people to perform crowd computing. In turn, this activity has opened several opportunities to address people's needs in various application areas, such as tourism, security, entertainment and emergency response. However, the design of these applications has also brought several challenges to software designers. Since users of these systems interact among them in heterogeneous physical scenarios, their interactions should be formally considered in the design of these applications in order to determine whether or not the services embedded in the system are suitable to support those interactions. The lack of guidelines to address this modeling issue not only jeopardizes the suitability of these applications, but also implies the services provided by the system can be evaluated only after implementation, which is clearly risky and expensive. This article proposes an initial modeling language that allows software designers to address this challenge through the representation of the interaction among users of a system. The interaction model represented using the proposed language allows designers to evaluate, at the design time, the information flow and the availability of interaction supporting services in the system. The usability and usefulness of the proposal are shown using a running example.

Mother caregivers of children with cancer are often unaware of how the tasks of caregiving interfere in their social relationships and lifestyle. This article explores how persuasive mobile technologies may promote the self-reflection and introspection of communication practices, emotions, and lifestyle. The article describes the design of EmotionMingle, a mobile system running in a situated display showing an ambient visualization using the metaphor of a tree to represent the status of an individual’s social network that, used in tandem with downloaded Facebook photographs, may help caregivers avoid social isolation. EmotionMingle also informs caregivers of how their emotions correlate with their communication practices and lifestyle. The results of a qualitative evaluation of the EmotionMingle prototype reveal that mother caregivers perceived it as useful and its visualizations as appropriate. The findings from this study reveal emergent practices of using mobile persuasive applications for self-reflection to discover wellness trends, possibly inducing behavior change.

Difficulties creating process descriptions can occur because the processes extend beyond coordination, including for instance conversations, meetings, and discussions. These tasks are difficult to describe using conventional business process modeling languages, which tend to emphasize coordination. There is a need then to provide facilities for the description of highly collaborative activities. This paper proposes an extension to the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) modeling language. It includes notation to handle some of the commonly occurring tasks in highly collaborative processes. A case study concerning emergency response is presented showing how the proposed notation can be used, and how the extension provides additional expressiveness to BPMN.

The flexibility and changing nature of loosely coupled work makes presence awareness crucial to promote interactions among collaborators. Undergraduate students, in their efforts to accomplish coursework-related tasks, must deal with having several available channels to interact with others, accessing and sharing educational material, and the need to optimize their time. Most of them work in a loosely coupled way as the main strategy to reduce the effort spent in the educational process. Presence awareness may help them achieve interactions among potential collaborators in this scenario. This paper aims to identify the most suitable presence awareness information to promote on-demand interactions among college students. A study was conducted for this purpose, involving undergraduate engineering students from two universities in Chile. This article also presents a classification of presence awareness mechanisms for loosely-coupled mobile group work.

Growing population and service interconnection make urban areas increasingly vulnerable to emergency situations. Although the firefighting response process plays a key role in most urban emergencies, it has remained essentially unchanged in the past decades; therefore it has several limitations to coordinate effective and efficient response activities. This paper studies the firefighting initial response process in order to measure, understand and improve it. The study involved a literature review, interviews with firefighting personnel and the analysis of 66 urban emergencies in the city of Santiago (Chile). Based on the obtained results this article proposes an emergency coordination system to improve the initial response process in urban emergencies. In order to realize the impact of the proposed system on the initial response process, a simulation based on past emergencies is presented and discussed.

Many educators and educational institutions include an online discussion forum in the content management system supporting their courses, because they think such tool facilitates the instructional process. It could be true if we explicitly design the instructional process to take advantage of this tool, but to do so we have to better understand how users actually use online discussion boards. Trying to answer such a question this paper presents a study of discussions occurring in several undergraduate courses in computer science offered by the University of Chile. More specifically, the study was based on the semantic analysis of a representative set of messages registered in eight different courses occurring in a period of two years. The obtained results indicate that the users do not perceive the forum as a learning tool, but as a communication platform that allows them to socialize and address coordination and operative issues related with the courses.

Firefighters are responsible for dealing with several types of urban emergencies, such as fires, car crashes and explosions. The participants in an emergency response process require shared information to make effective, on-time decisions, and to coordinate their activities. The information sharing process is currently performed using message exchange through a radio system. However, limitations in this communication medium jeopardize information availability during the emergency. This may produce undesirable situations, such as lack of coordination among firefighters or wrong decisions due to lack of supporting information. As a way to deal with the problem, this article proposes a computer-based system, which complements the radio system. The system helps increase the availability of the information that is most frequently requested by firefighters in the field, identified by a study of 65 past emergencies. The results of a preliminary evaluation indicate the solution is able to ensure the availability of at least the 30% of the most requested information during an emergency.

The complexity of modeling mobile groupware systems is well known. The mobility of the collaborators, the diverse technologies available to support them and the continuous change in the collaboration scenarios bring new challenges to the design of these applications. Currently there are few languages explicitly designed to model these groupware systems. This paper presents the Mobile Collaboration Modeling language, a graphical language to represent loosely coupled mobile collaborative work. This language may be used to communicate work practices, determine user requirements and design a groupware application that accurately supports collaborative mobile work. This article presents a case study illustrating the suitability of the proposal.

One of the problems affecting fire departments in Latin America is the lack of a strong infrastructure to overcome their communication problems. Because these organizations are mainly volunteer and receive minimal support from government agencies, most existing solutions are not applicable for them. This article presents a low-cost mobile groupware application, which may be used in emergency situations to overcome the firefighters' communication problems. The tool, named MobileMap, allows exchanging textual and graphical information using mobile devices. Therefore, this solution complements the frequently over-used radio communication systems. This tool was evaluated in a simulated and a real scenario; the obtained results are highly encouraging.

Traditionally, collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. Although several requirements involved in these products are recurrent, some become invisible to clients and developers because they are part of the product back- end. This situation is worse in the case of mobile groupware because the general requirements to support mobile collaboration are still unclear. This paper presents a framework of general requirements that are usually present in mobile shared workspaces. These requirements are not always visible; therefore the framework acts as a checklist helping developers to consider them. Thus, the framework could increase the success probability of mobile shared workspaces.

The use of past information is becoming critical for organizations. Coordination, decision making and negotiation are some of the collaborative activities that depend on it. However, the need to provide privacy and information retrieval capabilities to all users of an organizational memory system (OMS), requires a good strategy for acquiring and structuring the information. This paper presents a strategy intended to (a) facilitate the feeding of an OMS based on information stored in legacy information systems, (b) ease the information retrieval process, and (c) provide an automatic privacy mechanism for the information stored in the OMS.

People are usually concerned with the privacy of their personal information. However, the problem of privacy is also present when the information is directly linked to people, for example in personal opinions, discussions and decisions. Typically, if this information is indefinitely stored in an organizational memory system, then it may cause privacy problems inside the organization. Privacy is needed for users to feel free enough to express themselves honestly, and consequently, for the collaborative software to succeed. This paper presents a model to incorporate automatic privacy measures in an Organizational Memory System