This work presents integral actions towards women in engineering recognition organized according to educational stages they are directed: Stage 1, from early childhood education, primary education and secondary education; Stage 2, during university and Stage 3 after university. At stage 1 actions are devised to increase girl's interest on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Emphasis is put on showing women in engineering as role models, illustrating engineers work and stressing the importance of diversity in working groups. Stage 2 is focused on making male and female students aware of the gender gap in engineering and the importance of diversity for innovation and training female students on known female narrow circumstances. Finally, at stage 3, the objective is to retain and promote women in the engineering profession. The specific actions developed at the three stages are presented. Their impact is discussed in order to accomplish effective actions for achieving gender balance towards excellence in Engineering.

Using tangible interfaces for educational purposes presents considerable advantages and can provide an increase in student engagement and motivation, and showed particularly suitable in inclusive education. One of the main problems encountered in the use of tangible tabletop in the educational environment is the lack of software for programming and use that meets educational needs and is easy to use, especially for teachers who don't master programming logic. This work presents an editor of pedagogical activities developed for tangible tabletop to teachers develop pedagogical activities in inclusive context, intuitively and easily. The new editor was designed from a research with a group of undergraduate education course students, which used an available editor and evaluated its usability. After that, was carried out the new editor requirements elicitation, with the modeling and implementation of the same one. A new group of students of the same course used the new developed editor (E-dub-a) and evaluated its usability.

Active learning requires that students receive a continuous feedback about their understanding. Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ) tests have been frequently used to provide students the required feedback and to measure the effectiveness of this learning model. To construct a test is a challenging task, which is time consuming and requires experience. For these reasons, research efforts have been focused on the automatic generation of well-constructed tests. The semantic technologies have played a relevant role in the implementation of these testgeneration systems. Nevertheless, the existing proposals present a set of drawbacks that restrict their applicability to different learning domains and the type of test to be composed. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented and semantic-based system that solves these drawbacks. The system consists of a dynamic strategy of generating candidate distractors (alternatives to the correct answer), a set of heuristics for scoring the distractors' suitability, and a selection of distractors that considers the difficulty level of tests. Besides, the final version of tests is created using the Google Form service, a de-facto standard for elaborating online questionnaires.

In the last years, Affective Computing investigations have focused the efforts in the automatic extraction of human emotions and in increasing the success rates in the emotion recognition task. However, there is a lack of automatic tools that intuitively visualize the users' emotional information. In this work, we propose Emotracker, a novel tool based on the combination of eye tracking and facial emotional recognition technologies that allows the visualization of contents, user emotions and gaze at a glance, and offers a wide range of visualization options, including emotional saccade maps and emotional heat maps. The simultaneous consideration of gaze and emotion opens the door to the evaluation of user engagement, which is of great importance for content creators, but has also other promising fields of application in psychology research and, more specifically, in autism.

Affective Computing researches use to be focused in the automatic extraction of human emotions and in increasing the success rates in the emotion recognition task. However, there is a lack of automatic tools that intuitively visualize the users' emotional information. In this paper, the development of a novel tool that allows the visualization of contents, user emotions and gaze at a glance is presented. The tool, called Emotracker, is based on the combination of eye tracking and facial emotional recognition technologies, and offers a wide range of visualization options, including emotional saccade maps and emotional heat maps. The simultaneous consideration of gaze and emotion opens the door to the evaluation of user engagement in a wide range of applications.

This paper presents "ToyVision": a software toolkit developed to facilitate the implementation of tangible games in visual-based tabletop devices. Compared to other toolkits for tabletops which offer very limited and tag-centered tangible possibilities, ToyVision provides designers with tools for modeling and implementing innovative tangible playing pieces with a high level of abstraction from the hardware. For this purpose, a new abstraction layer (the Widget layer) has been included in an already existing tabletop framework (ReacTIVision), providing the host application with high processed data about each playing piece involved in the game. To support the framework application, a Graphic Assistant tool enables the designer to visually model all the playing pieces into tangible tokens that can be tracked and controlled by the framework software. As a practical example, the complete process of prototyping a tangible game is described.

Studio participants will design and prototype tangible board-games for NIKVision: a tabletop computer for young children. The goal of this studio is to give designers and developers hands-on experience of developing a functional prototype of a tangible tabletop application without the intrinsic difficulties of managing electronic sensors, actuators and machine vision algorithms. During the studio attendees will complete a simple but conceptually complete tangible board-game prototype during the workshop day by abstracting the technologies and keeping focus firmly on the application behaviours and the interactions between users, objects and the system. This will be achieved through using the ToyVision toolkit, a set of software tools that lowers the threshold of prototyping both the "bits" and "atoms" of interactive tabletop games.

This paper presents a case study of the design lifecycle of games involving tangible interaction toys handled on an active surface tabletop. The games are oriented to 3--6 year old children, so special care has been taken in the methods used to involve them in a child-centered design lifecycle. The iterative nature of this design paradigm was supported by frequent test sessions where data relating to usability and fun was captured and analyzed in order to guide successive design iterations until a finished product was achieved. The aim is to guide designers intending to involve children in similar tabletop game creation projects. Details are given of how data collected from test sessions with children revealed usability problems and helped to create, evolve and improve the games.

We present a new set of toys and games especially designed to bring tabletop interaction closer to very young children. The use of these toys will be shown in an especially designed tabletop device adapted to children aged between 3 to 6 years old. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that these toys use a tangible interaction approach that can be easily adapted to any tabletop device based on visual recognition software. The final aim of this work is to combine physical group activities with educative computer games, in a unique interactive experience.

Interactive Digital TV has arisen new forms of interaction not traditionally associated with this medium. One of its applications is the so-called “t-learning” or TV-based interactive learning. To date, most existing t-learning applications confine themselves to edutainment more than to more complex and pedagogical forms of learning, due to the technological constraints imposed by set-top boxes. This paper overcomes those technological barriers to propose the first t-learning affective aware tutoring tool. The tool allows to capture by means of a camera the facial expressions of the student while performing evaluations (tests) through a broadcasted interactive t-learning application at home. It integrates a novel Artificial Intelligence method for facial affect recognition, where facial expressions are evaluated with a psychological 2-dimensional continuous affective approach. Thanks to it, the t-learning tool is able to automatically extract emotional information from the learner, which is further presented in a simple and efficient way to the distance tutor so that he can be aware of student's encountered difficulties and emotional progression during the learning process.

The interpretation of user facial expressions is a very useful method for emotional sensing and it constitutes an indispensable part of affective Human Computer Interface designs. Facial expressions are often classified into one of several basic emotion categories. This categorical approach seems poor to treat faces with blended emotions, as well as to measure the intensity of a given emotion. This paper presents an effective system for facial emotional classification, where facial expressions are evaluated with a psychological 2-dimensional continuous affective approach. At its output, an expressional face is represented as a point in a 2D space characterized by evaluation and activation factors. The proposed system first starts with a classification method in discrete categories based on a novel combination of classifiers, that is subsequently mapped in a 2D space in order to be able to consider intermediate emotional states. The system has been tested with an extensive universal database and human assessment has been taken into consideration in the evaluation of results.

This paper describes a tabletop prototype that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer to manipulative learning. After analyzing children's cognitive and psychomotorial skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on observations of the children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment with the prototype.

The basis of this study is the concept of double presence in the theoretical mainframe of production-reproduction model. Current Spanish reality has created a conflict between productive and reproductive work and has caused an unequal distribution between women and men, of both the weight and the value of the work. The access of Spanish women scientists and engineers in technically related research fields has been increasing in a spectacular way in Spain in the past few years, giving rise to a new, socially different group regarding its activity and double presence in the productive and reproductive model. From this viewpoint, the university offers apparent workplace flexibility and a different productivity concept that perhaps could be an interesting study case for solving this conflict, tacitly assumed by Spanish society. The study chose technical women (both scientists and engineers) holding university positions at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) as the object of study. The research consists of a questionnaire focused on the tensions due to the double presence of women, and its direct consequences in their vertical professional progress and also in the relative importance given to each role. The results of the study show that there are two different groups of women, one that gives priority to their families, and another that shows the greatest availability not only to travel because of working reasons, but also to move out for promotion. These two groups correspond to different social situations, and also derive from different work positions. General results of their opinion about both their work and their reproductive responsibilities are also given.

Since the appearance of the first woman engineer in the 50's till now, a massive incorporation of women in the technology area (more quantitative than qualitative) is being produced. This evolution has placed Spain over the medium world level. The article intends to gather information to synthesize the present situation of the women-technology relationship in the Aragon Autonomous Region and in Spain. Moreover, the change in the latest years is shown, framed in context of the European reference system. The study of the gender variable is confronted not only at the educational but also at the labour market level. Statistics are presented about the evolution of the presence of women from the first education levels and in the choice of the technological options in the secondary level. The situation at University level and in the technological research world is also outlined. With regard to the labour market, statistical data about the incorporation of women into work with increasing reality since the 80's, are included. The article intends to give keys for the analysis about this quick evolution. It gives a historical perspective inside the Spanish framework and hints at future tendencies.