Code tracing involves simulating at a high level the actions the computer takes when executing a program. Given that students experience difficulties learning this fundamental skill, research is needed on how to effectively teach it. We report on two studies that investigate the pedagogical utility of various notional machine representations used to explain the mechanics of program execution. In study 1 (N = 44), we compared instruction using a concrete computer representation to an abstract table representation. In study 2 (N = 50), we tested if fading between representations improved learning over only providing one representation. The instruction in both studies was embedded in basic tutoring systems we implemented that served as testbeds for the present research. On average students did learn in each study, as evidenced by pretest to posttest gains, but the type of representation did not significantly affect learning; Bayesian statistics provided substantial evidence for this null result. We discuss potential explanations for our findings and suggest future research directions.

Instructional videos are frequently used in online courses and websites. Such videos may include an instructor delivering a monologue-style presentation, or alternatively, engaging in a dialogue with a student who appears in the video alongside of the instructor. We compared three instructional video designs (N = 77), including monologue and dialogue style presentations. To obtain a comprehensive view of the impact of video design, we used a variety of measures, including eye tracking data, learning gains, self-efficacy, cognitive load, social presence, and interest. Despite eye tracking data showing that participants in speaker-visible conditions spent significantly less time on the domain content, learning and related variables were similar in all three conditions, a result we confirmed with Bayesian statistics that provided substantial evidence for the null model. Altogether, we provide evidence that learning and interest are not enhanced by a dialogue-style presentation or visual presence of the instructor. However, further work is needed to investigate the effect of other domains, speaker persona and saliency, and configuration of the speakers in the instructional video.

Learning to program requires perseverance, practice, and the mindset that programming skills are improved through these activities (i.e., that everyone has the potential to become good at programming). In contrast to an entity mindset, individuals with an incremental mindset believe that ability is malleable and can be improved with effort. Prior research shows that an incremental mindset can be promoted through interventions and that, as a result, individuals report increased belief in the value of effort. Although this is encouraging, the majority of research targets a general mindset, and so little work exists exploring the effect of this construct in the programming domain. The present study ( N = 47) used a programming activity to test the effect of an incremental mindset intervention on participants’ beliefs, effort, programming behaviors, and performance in an experimental study. The intervention was successful. Compared to the control group, the experimental group shifted significantly more toward an incremental mindset, which resulted in beneficial behaviors related to effort, namely higher time on task and more program creation and modification actions. These positive behaviors, however, did not translate to improvements in programming performance. We speculate the reason for this latter finding may be related to the need for additional domain-based support.

As technology is increasingly integrated into the classroom, understanding the facilitators and barriers for deployment becomes an important part of the process. While systems that employ traditional WIMP-based interfaces have a well-established body of work describing their integration into classroom environments, more novel technologies generally lack such a foundation to guide their advancement. In this paper we present Robo-Tangible Activities for Geometry (rTAG), a tangible learning environment that utilizes a teachable agent framing, together with a physical robotic agent. We describe its deployment in a school environment, qualitatively analyzing how teachers chose to orchestrate its use, the value they saw in it, and the barriers they faced while organizing the sessions with their students. Based on this analysis, we extract four recommendations that aid in designing and deploying systems that make use of affordances that are similar to those of the rTAG system.

A teachable agent is a learning companion that students teach about a domain they are trying to master. While most teachable agents have been virtual, there may be advantages to having students teach an agent with a physical form (i.e., a robot). The robot may better engage students in the learning activity, and if students take embodied action in order to instruct the robot, they may develop deeper knowledge. In this paper, we investigate these two hypotheses using the rTAG system, a teachable robot for geometry learning. In a study with 37 4th-6th grade participants, we compare rTAG to two other conditions, one where students use embodied action to teach a virtual agent, and one where students teach a virtual agent on a personal computer. We find that while there are no significant learning differences between conditions, students' perceptions of the agent are influenced by condition and prior knowledge.

Students self-reported not only their emotional state, but also the causal attributions of their emotions. After coding emotions with internal references to self, and external references to the environment or domain, we examined how sub-groups of students based on internal/external attributions and above or below median performance differ in terms of their emotional state, perceptions of item difficulty, and gender.

We report on the reactions of males and female students to the presence of animated pedagogical agents that provided emotional and motivational support. One hundred high school students used agents embedded in an Intelligent Tutoring System for Mathematics and randomized controlled evaluations compared students with and without learning companions. The results indicate that affective pedagogical agents improve affective outcomes of students in general and particularly so for female students, who reported being more frustrated and less confident while solving math problems prior to using the tutoring system. We discuss issues of incorporating gender into user models and of generating responses tailored to gender.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine security incident response practices of information technology (IT) security practitioners as a diagnostic work process, including the preparation phase, detection, and analysis of anomalies. Design/methodology/approach The data set consisted of 16 semi‐structured interviews with IT security practitioners from seven organizational types (e.g. academic, government, and private). The interviews were analyzed using qualitative description with constant comparison and inductive analysis of the data to analyze diagnostic work during security incident response. Findings The analysis shows that security incident response is a highly collaborative activity, which may involve practitioners developing their own tools to perform specific tasks. The results also show that diagnosis during incident response is complicated by practitioners' need to rely on tacit knowledge, as well as usability issues with security tools. Research limitations/implications Owing to the nature of semi‐structured interviews, not all participants discussed security incident response at the same level of detail. More data are required to generalize and refine the findings. Originality/value The contribution of the work is twofold. First, using empirical data, the paper analyzes and describes the tasks, skills, strategies, and tools that security practitioners use to diagnose security incidents. The findings enhance the research community's understanding of the diagnostic work during security incident response. Second, the paper identifies opportunities for future research directions related to improving security tools.

In Game As Life --- Life As Game (GALLAG), ubiquitous computing and personally-tailored game scenarios integrate activities across the virtual and physical domains to further extend emerging avant-garde "real-life games" that are coordinated by digital means to blur digital-physical-social barriers. Influences and activities in GALLAG game scenarios affect real life and vice versa. To realize this, we are using several methods of experience and behavioral assessment, as well as environmental, contextual and physiological sensors, in conjunction with participatory design approaches that include end-user-programming. This agenda empowers users to create their own synergies between their on-line activities to help them achieve their personal realworld aspirations. Ultimately GALLAG is leading to "Life Long Games" that provide persistent, supportive, and actualizing experiences.

Pendaphonics is a tangible physical-digital-sonic environment and interactive system that motivates children and adults to be physically active and explorative. The development of this system presents a strategy for the design and evaluation of a low-cost, flexible, large scale tangible system that is engaging for children and adults alike. Pendaphonics has been installed in a public new media arts space, where over 200 people have interacted with it. Here, we describe Pendaphonics tangible interaction scenarios, including the broad potential of this system as a compositional and choreographic tool, an educational exhibit, and as an interface that facilitates playful interaction, exploration, discovery and creativity.

Research shows that children construct much of their knowledge through active manipulation of the environment, which allows them to connect abstract concepts to observable outcomes. Despite these findings, although the integration of novel pedagogical technologies into classroom settings has begun, the technologies predominantly have focused on instruction in virtual contexts. To date, however, little is known about novel technologies that step outside of the virtual realm into the physical classroom, thereby leveraging findings on embodied mathematical cognition to influence educational practices. As a first step in filling this gap, we present the Active Learning Environment with Robotics Tangibles (ALERT) framework. Our system relies on human-robot interaction and tangible instruction to motivate and trigger learning in students through a variety of activities that integrate play and instruction in mixed reality environments. Here we describe some of the activities supported by ALERT, and discuss plans for evaluating the pedagogical utility of the system.

This paper describes the use of sensors in intelligent tutors to detect students' affective states and to embed emotional support. Using four sensors in two classroom experiments the tutor dynamically collected data streams of physiological activity and students' self-reports of emotions. Evidence indicates that state-based fluctuating student emotions are related to larger, longer-term affective variables such as self-concept in mathematics. Students produced self-reports of emotions and models were created to automatically infer these emotions from physiological data from the sensors. Summaries of student physiological activity, in particular data streams from facial detection software, helped to predict more than 60% of the variance of students emotional states, which is much better than predicting emotions from other contextual variables from the tutor, when these sensors are absent. This research also provides evidence that by modifying the “context” of the tutoring system we may well be able to optimize students' emotion reports and in turn improve math attitudes.

An intrusion detection system (IDS) can be a key component of security incident response within organizations. Traditionally, intrusion detection research has focused on improving the accuracy of IDSs, but recent work has recognized the need to support the security practitioners who receive the IDS alarms and investigate suspected incidents. To examine the challenges associated with deploying and maintaining an IDS, we analyzed 9 interviews with IT security practitioners who have worked with IDSs and performed participatory observations in an organization deploying a network IDS. We had three main research questions: (1) What do security practitioners expect from an IDS?; (2) What difficulties do they encounter when installing and configuring an IDS?; and (3) How can the usability of an IDS be improved? Our analysis reveals both positive and negative perceptions that security practitioners have for IDSs, as well as several issues encountered during the initial stages of IDS deployment. In particular, practitioners found it difficult to decide where to place the IDS and how to best configure it for use within a distributed environment with multiple stakeholders. We provide recommendations for tool support to help mitigate these challenges and reduce the effort of introducing an IDS within an organization.