This paper presents a study developed in the framework of a training course for teachers of STEM areas on the JuxtaLearn process. This process, divided into eight steps, aims to improve student understanding of threshold concepts by planning, editing and sharing creative videos in CLIPIT. CLIPIT is an online platform for collaborative learning designed to support the JuxtaLearn process. We describe the training of eight teachers, and the subsequent supervision of one of them, a math teacher, made to understand how the JuxtaLearn process was applied with her students. We collect qualitative data through the observation of the teacher's work. Also, quantitative data through initial and final quizzes applied to the students, to understand their level of understanding of the tricky topic, automatic records on CLIPIT and a satisfaction questionnaire applied to the eight teachers to assess the ease of use with the CLIPIT. The results show that teachers were able to put into practice the eight steps of the JuxtaLearn process and suggest that students’ engagement in creating creative videos helped them in overcoming tricky math topics.

This paper presents a study developed in the scope of a larger project that aims to understand how video editing and content sharing in public displays can be used at schools to promote the informal engagement of students with curricular contents that are essential to foster future learning. The study involved a video competition where students were invited to create videos around specific pedagogical topics. These videos were subsequently presented in the public display at the school, and students could use a mobile application to rate, create comments or just bookmark the videos. Findings suggest that students are receptive to creating videos and sharing them in public displays. However, the results also show that few students that used the application to interact with the content. Many reasons for this are presented such as unawareness that the display is interactive ‘because it seems like a regular TV’, too small a number of interesting videos shown during the video contest. Particular barriers included not owning a mobile device capable of interacting, and the limitation of the large screen which does not allow searching ‘the videos we like’, as YouTube seems to do.

The Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm brings about an important challenge: to make environments adaptive, responsive, and reactive to users’ current contextual situations. It proclaims that our e...

The creation of smart environments that are adaptive and responsive to the context in which they are being used has been one of the strongest ideas in ambient intelligence, but also one of the areas in which there seems to be a persistent gap between the initial promises and its real achievements. A possible reason why this is so challenging is that context-driven interaction and systems support are highly interdependent, but are rarely designed together. In this paper, we analyse the implications of context-driven interaction to the type of systems support provided by smart environments. The analysis is based on the study of previous work in this area and structured around three main dimensions of interaction with smart environments: physical integration; spontaneous interoperation and application programming abstractions. The contributions of this paper are 2-fold: a characterization of the system design space according to the requirements raised by context-driven interaction and the identification of new alternative paths for the integration of context-driven interaction into smart environments.

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We argue that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applications. As a consequence, interaction represents a major overhead for developers, and users are faced with inconsistent interaction models across different displays. This paper describes the results of the evaluation of a widget toolkit for generalized interaction with public displays. Our toolkit was developed for web-based applications and it supports multiple interaction mechanisms, automatically generated graphical interfaces, asynchronous events and concurrent interaction. We have evaluated the toolkit along various dimensions - system performance, API usability, and real-world deployment - and we present and discuss the results in this paper.

We propose a system which allows users to select how and with whom they are available for contact by managing a set of personal "identities" and budding relationships. The most important of these media are public displays, which allow a low-cost barrier for finding potential friends through interaction via the display and through the attendance of displayed social events. In helping two people to both become aware of each other's existence and to pick media which suit their preferences, we believe such a system can increase the odds of two strangers forming a strong social bond.

Human mobility has been widely studied for a variety of purposes, from urban planning to the study of spread of diseases. These studies depend heavily on large datasets, and recent advances in collaborative sensing and WiFi infrastructures have created new opportunities for generating that data. However, these methods and procedures require the participation of a significant community of users through extended periods of time. In this paper, we address the problem of how to engage people to participate in the data collection process. We have conducted a user study on the utilisation of a mobile collaborative sensing application. We have found that users react positively to campaigns, but it is difficult to keep them participating for long periods of time. We also hypothesise that one must close the loop, rewarding the participants with services based on the collected data, eventually showing that there is added value obtainable from crowd sourcing.

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We believe that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applications. In this demo we present PuReWidgets, a toolkit that developers can use in their public display applications to support the interaction process across multiple display systems, without considering the specifics of what interaction modality will be used on each particular display. PuReWidgets provides high-level widgets to application programmers, and allows users to interact via various interaction mechanisms, such as graphical user interfaces for mobile devices, QR codes, SMS, etc.

The mobile Internet is enabling a broad range of new applications that dynamically obtain information that is relevant to their current location. This type of application would greatly benefit from generic mechanisms for supporting the association between network resources and physical space, but existing systems are typically based on vertical approaches valid only for narrow application scenarios. This paper argues that a comprehensive solution to this issue should address the important challenges of heterogeneity and openness, and proposes an approach based on the concept of location-based service, i.e. a service whose usage is associated with physical space, as a generic abstraction to support the development of location-dependent systems. The paper describes a model for associating location scopes with services, an architecture to support the discovery of location-based services on the Internet, and a prototype infrastructure in which several services and applications have been developed for validating the architecture.