This paper introduces OSMoSIS, a novel tool for assessing Social Motor Synchrony (SMS) in naturalistic child-facilitator interactions. Unlike Motion Energy Analysis (MEA), which is limited to seated or highly controlled tasks, OSMoSIS captures full-body interactions and computes synchrony through position correlation (PC) and specific kinetic energy correlation (SKEC). We evaluated OSMoSIS during music therapy sessions with twelve autistic children, using synchronous (movement-contingent) and asynchronous (non-contingent) sound mappings as a testbed to elicit contrasting interaction dynamics. Our results show that SKEC was sensitive to condition differences, whereas PC was not in this setting, indicating that OSMoSIS provides a suite of indices in which SKEC serves as the primary marker for dynamic, whole-body contexts and PC as a supporting, posture-aligned measure. Complementary coding with Interact behavioural coding software revealed reduced non-response under synchronous conditions, supporting the convergent validity of OSMoSIS. We argue that OSMoSIS advances the measurement of SMS beyond MEA, enabling analysis in ecologically valid contexts such as therapeutic and educational interventions.

UPDATED—2024/04/17 13:30:54. This paper reports on work in progress to develop an assessment tool for Social Motor Synchrony (SMS) in children’s interactions. Expanding upon the foundation provided by the OSMoSIS motor sonification tool, we have developed an innovative approach for measuring SMS with children. Our method aims to overcome challenges stemming from variations in research settings and objectives encountered in studying SMS within the context of full-body interaction. Current tools for investigating SMS have been conducted in fixed settings, often limiting the interacting individuals to a seated position. However, this is in stark contrast to interventions such as music therapy, where the emphasis is on full-body interactions, and the settings exhibit considerable diversity. In such contexts, unrestricted movement is recognised as a fundamental element contributing to the overall efficacy and authenticity of the therapeutic experience, making it important to preserve the inherent benefits of a naturalistic setting. The study described in this paper explores the utility of OSMoSIS as a tool for assessing social motor synchrony revealing intriguing differences when comparing OSMoSIS with the well-known MEA software. This study not only brings a fresh perspective to the evaluation of social motor synchrony but also offers unique insights that set it apart from existing tools.

With the recent growth in interest in computing education for younger children, concrete representations have enabled children to understand concepts that, in abstract form, may otherwise be considered too advanced. Introducing children to computing concepts through concrete representations may be necessary at younger ages, but there is also a need for effective methods for progressing from this towards abstract understanding. Concreteness Fading has previously been applied in computing contexts with some success, but questions remain about how to design learning environments that most effectively support this progression, including the role of intermediate representations. This paper presents an augmented reality (AR) environment that uses the Concreteness Fading approach to teach introductory topics in computer networks. An in-school experiment with 59 children aged 9-10 investigated the effect of three distinct methods of fading representations from concrete to abstract, using a between-groups pre-test / post-test design. Three groups were compared: concrete > concrete > abstract (“two-step”), concrete > intermediate > abstract (“three-step”), and concrete > concrete/intermediate > intermediate > intermediate/abstract > abstract (“five-step”). The results showed a statistically significant difference between the two- and three-step groups in favour of the three-step, confirming the value of explicitly linking mutual referents via an intermediate representation when moving from concrete to abstract. No statistically significant difference was found between the three- and five-step groups, suggesting that increasing the number of intermediate representations does not significantly improve the learning outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of educational technology for children.

Computing concepts are often introduced to children using interactive concrete representations, such as Computer Science Unplugged (CSU) activities - an approach that may positively affect attitudes towards computing when applied in extra-curricular settings. However, within the classroom, children may be required to interact with abstract representations, e.g. during programming tasks, and little is known about how to design CSU activities that support this. Prior work in mathematics and computing suggests that the Theoretical Model of Concreteness Fading (TMCF) may effectively scaffold the progression from concrete to abstract and improve learning outcomes. This paper aims to investigate one of the TMCF recommendations: the use of physical manipulatives, motivated by the growing body of evidence that suggests that virtual manipulatives can, in many contexts, be equally effective while providing several design advantages. An experiment was conducted with 48 children to compare two alternative implementations of Concreteness Fading learning materials: physical concrete (Playmobil toys) vs. virtual concrete (an AR iPad app), on learning gains and attitudinal change. Using these materials, children were taught the fundamentals of network structure and internet routing. Results indicated no significant difference between groups on either measure.

A notional machine is a pedagogic device to assist the understanding of some aspect of programs or programming. It is typically used to support explaining a programming construct, or the user-understandable semantics of a program. For example, a variable is like a box with a label, and assignment copies or moves a value into that box. This working group will capture examples of notional machines from actual pedagogical practice, as expressed in textbooks (or other teaching materials) or used in the classroom. We will interview at least 30 teachers about their experience with, and perceptions of, the use of notional machines in teaching. Using the interviews, we will work on devising and refining a form to characterise essential features of notional machines. We will also attempt to relate them to each other to describe potential learning sequences or progressions. The working group report will contain descriptions of notional machines used at different levels in education, in different countries, by many teachers. Capturing and Characterising Notional Machines Sally Fincher, Johan Jeuring, Craig S Miller Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). ITiCSE 2020,,Trondheim, Norway © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 978-1-4503-0000-0/18/06...$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/1234567890 The resulting catalogue of notional machines will allow a teacher to select a machine for a particular use, permit comparison between them, and provide a starting point for further categorization and analysis of notional machines. Additionally, we will make more theoretical explorations. We will explore a variety of presentational formats, examining what is necessary and what superfluous; we will look for dimensions of comparison and will examine how notional machines are instantiated across the discipline. We argue that the creation and use of notional machines is potentially a signature pedagogy for computing [1] and that creating and using notional machines represents a certain level of pedagogic sophistication that might be an indicator of pedagogic content knowledge (PCK).

Creating narrative-based computer games is a complex and challenging task. Narrative Threads is a suite of software tools designed to aid young people (aged 11-15) in creating their own narrative-based games as a writing development activity. A participatory design process highlighted the areas where additional support was required, and informed the iterative design of Narrative Threads. The tools are implemented as a plugin to a commercial game creation toolset, and constitute character and object design tools, a branching narrative diagramming tool and an augmented story map view. In this paper, we provide an overview of the design of the tools and describe an evaluation carried out with 14 children over a four-day workshop. The study examined tool usage patterns, and compared games created with Narrative Threads to those created using the standard toolset. The results suggest a number of ways in which dynamic external representations of story elements can support writing activities in narrative-based game creation. Young designers using Narrative Threads wrote more character dialogue, made stronger links between the conversations they wrote and wider game events, and designed more complex characters, compared to those using the standard toolset. In addition to showing how Narrative Threads can support young games designers, the results have broader implications for anyone looking to support storytelling and writing through game creation activities and tools.

Many tutoring systems have employed problem-focused strategies for helping students regulate their emotional states. This paper describes an affective tutoring system that added an emotion-focused strategy (a relaxation exercise) to a standard problemfocused strategy (programming advice and feedback) in order to help students better regulate their emotional states when learning about data structure manipulation. The evaluation indicated that this additional strategy improved learning outcomes and was helpful in emotionally supporting students with both good and poor performance.

A central challenge in the design of motivationally intelligent tutoring systems lies in defining and diagnosing a learner's motivational state: in particular, in distinguishing between the learner's motivational and affective states. We discuss existing AIED approaches and outline an alternative approach that incorporates reflective peer collaboration. The paper raises questions about the basis for the design of motivationally intelligent tutoring systems.

We propose a design model for guiding learning in exploratory environments through representational choices. Selecting the appropriate representations at the correct granularity can foreground the salient activities and background the irrelevant.. We demonstrate how this model can be applied via learner-centred design to ensure that the engaging factors of an environment are preserved whilst the learner is guided towards the development of specific skills.

This paper explores the role that feedback based on past actions and motivational states of the learner can have in a motivationally and metacognitively aware Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) focused on programming.

Students use both domain-dependent strategies (such as seeking specific domain help) and domain-independent strategies (such as relaxation exercises) to help regulate their affective states when learning. This paper reports a study that compared students' performance in learning data-structures across two systems. While both systems supported domain-dependent strategies, one additionally supported domain-independent strategies (relaxation exercises). The results provide some evidence that students working with both domain-dependent and domain-independent strategies performed better than those working with domain-dependent strategies only.

We describe an innovative educational system designed to, firstly, motivate young people to engage with computational concepts and secondly, provide them with tools to do so in an embodied manner. The interface is designed as a "magic mirror" in which users can, through augmented reality technology, take on the role of a character and control the character's movements via their own movements. They are able to record movements, and using a Wii Remote as a mouse and pointing device, organise these movements into sequences. We are now working on ways in which the recorded movements can be manipulated in ways that foster computational thinking.

Although pair programming is becoming more prevalent in software development, and a number of reports have been written about it [4] [6], few have addressed the manner in which pairing actually takes place [5]. Even fewer consider the methods employed to manage issues such as role change or the communication of complex issues. Here we contribute by highlighting the way resources designed for individuals are re-appropriated and augmented to facilitate pair collaboration.

Several accounts of program comprehension have taken the theory of text comprehension by Kinstch as a starting point to model the mental representations built when programmers understand a computer program. A crucial point that these accounts try to explain is how these mental representations are organised. According to Kintsch's theory, the mental representations built as a product of the text comprehension process are interrelated propositional networks whose organisation is determined by the main idea of the text. In program comprehension, this main idea has been understood in terms of functionality. This paper contends this notion, proposing that in program understanding programmer's mental representations are multifaceted and organised through several criteria. Which of these is the most important one depends on the programming language employed among other factors. The fact that functional information appeared as crucial might have been because most of the empirical research that has been undertaken has employed procedural languages. This claim is tested empirically by analysing the mental representations of programmers in Prolog, a declarative programming language. The results support our claim by showing that in this case data structure information is more important than function

We describe the use of a simulated student in a synchronous but distributed collaborative learning environment in the domain of programming. The role of the simulated student is to detect and repair difficulties in collaborative learning amongst the human students, for example when a human student is too passive or when the students start chatting about off-topic conversations. The simulated student intervenes by posting messages in the shared "chat" window, just like the human students and was believed to be another human student by them. The paper describes the rules by which the simulated student operates and briefly outlines an evaluation of the system with university first year programming students. The system proved to be successful both in detecting a range of difficulties and in intervening effectively.

A program is described which can generate certain classes of cryptic clues automatically. The program can be used in conjunction with programs developed elsewhere for crossword compilation and clue insertion.