This research investigates a novel approach to supporting classroom learning communities through the use of proxemic interaction and ambient visualizations. Specifically, community knowledge is embedded within the physical space of the classroom, with the aim of mediating opportunistic inter-group interactions, instigated through proximity and shared artifacts. This approach entails decomposing the community knowledge-base into a collection of independent thematic sub-stores, and then conceptually distributing those sub-stores to mapped, demarcated locations around the classroom, called "Knowledge Places." This necessitates physical movement among and proximity to those places in order for students to contribute to or otherwise access their peers' contributions to the emerging knowledge-base. The present research studies the materialization of Knowledge Places over the course of ten weeks within a sixth-grade life science curriculum, with topics of food webs and ecosystems.

The propagation of Inquiry Based Learning has lead to many more elementary students interacting with authentic scientific tools and practices. However, the more problematic realities of scientific data collection, such as noise and large data sets, are often deliberately hidden from students. Students will need to confront these realities and be able to make skillful data scoping decisions in order to make sense of ever more prevalent large datasets. We dub software designed to support these activities Information-Building Applications (IBAs). This paper presents the design considerations that went into building an exemplar IBA, PhotoMAT (Photo Management and Analysis Tool), a brief user study to show how the solutions enacted by following these principles are taken up by actual students, and a discussion of how the design considerations identified by our work might be applied to another IBA.

This paper describes the design and pilot enactment of an instructional unit for elementary school students, Hunger Games, which centers on development of learner understandings of animal foraging behavior. Inspired by traditional teaching practices employing physical simulations, within the unit students engage in an embodied enactment of foraging using stuffed animals (with embedded RFID tags) as tangible avatars to represent their foraging among food patches (with camouflaged RFID readers) distributed around a classroom. Displays situated near the food patches provide students with information regarding the energy gain as the forage in the environment. A two-period pilot enactment of the unit demonstrated the feasibility of the design for classroom use, evidenced the development of affective relationships between learners and avatars, and afforded the emergence of unanticipated behaviors that promoted new questions about the science phenomena. The results suggest provisional support for the effectiveness of the unit as a science learning environment.

This paper describes an empirical study conducted to explore the expressive design space for what we dub "effortful interaction." Effortful interaction is a form of human-computer interaction where different degrees of physical effort are intentionally incorporated into the interaction design in order to communicate information. In this sense effortful interaction is similar to haptics, where devices provide physical force feedback to users, except the perceived feedback occurs entirely within users' proprioception: i.e., users' perception of their own bodies. Our larger design goal is to use effortful interaction to communicate quantitative information to children who aren't yet proficient with graphs. First, though, we had to establish if we could reliably induce sensations of effort. This study examined the sensitivity of children to three different design parameters (the duration of interaction, the intensity required by the interaction, and the physical modality of the interaction), and compares their responses to those of adults.

This paper describes a frequently-overlooked aspect of embodied interaction design: physical effort. Although exertion is the direct goal of many embodied activities (e.g., exergames), and is used indirectly to discourage certain user interactions (as with affordances), exertion has not been used to support direct expressive interaction with an embodied system. Situating exertion in both psychological and physiological literature, this paper suggests guidelines for employing exertion as more than just an incidental component of proprioception in embodied interaction designs. Specifically, the linkages between exertion, affect, and recall are reviewed and analyzed for their potential to support embodied learning activities, and literature concerning human perceptions of effort is reviewed to help designers understand how to incorporate effort more directly and intentionally in embodied interaction designs. Also presented is an illustration of how these guidelines affected the design of an educational embodied interaction experience for an informal learning setting.

In this paper we describe AquaRoom, a classroom-based spatial simulation of subterranean water flow. Beginning with the conceit that their classroom is a small town, students are asked to determine the topography and directional flow of a series of aquifers running beneath the town. Over the course of six sessions, students work in groups to enact a "dye tracing" method, using a variety of metaphorical procedures and "low fidelity" electronic and physical artifacts to simulate drilling, injection of dye tracers, and extraction and analysis of water samples, combining their data to construct an aggregate map.

Who's Who is a single-display groupware application designed for use by an entire class of young students. Utilizing a shared display, each user controls the state of discrete display elements using a simple interface on a handheld device; however, the semantics of user operations are left unspecified and become the subjects of guided student discovery. Interference among users is leveraged in support of student learning about the scientific principle of "control of variables," in particular, the strategy of varying one independent variable at a time in multivariate systems. We present the experience of a third-grade classroom that used Who's Who, including both an account of learning outcomes and a description of the technology and social interactions that led to those outcomes.

Several simulation environments exist that create a place in which students can explore scientific phenomena. In this paper, we propose design guidelines for creating a classroom environment that puts scientific concepts directly into that physical space. We examine the results of two implementations of WallCology, which we characterize as an embedded phenomenon, in elementary and middle-school classrooms. Several instances of innovative student inquiry emerged as a result of the design features. Along with the results of learning, we look at the relationship between an embodied approach to design and the imaginative role of the student.

The broadening array of technologies available to support the design of classroom activity has the potential to reshape science learning in schools. This paper presents a ubiquitous computing application, WallCology, which situates a virtual ecosystem within the unseen space of classroom walls, presenting affordances for science learners to engage in investigations of ecological phenomena. Motivated by a desire to foster authenticity in classroom science inquiry, WallCology extends the "embedded phenomena" framework in three ways: by enabling collaborative investigations among distributed work teams, by increasing the physicality of investigation activities, and by expanding the loci of activity sites. Pilot studies in two urban classrooms provide qualified support for the effectiveness of WallCology in promoting more authentic inquiry practices, content learning, and attitudes regarding scientific investigations.

'Embedded phenomena' is a learning technology framework in which simulated scientific phenomena are mapped onto the physical space of classrooms. Students monitor and control the local state of the simulation through distributed media positioned around the room, gathering and aggregating evidence to solve problems or answer questions related to those phenomena. Embedded phenomena are persistent, running continuously over weeks and months, creating information channels that are temporally and physically interleaved with, but asynchronous with respect to, the regular flow of instruction. In this paper, we describe the motivations for the framework, describe classroom experiences with three embedded phenomena in the domains of seismology, insect ecology, and astronomy, and situate embedded phenomena within the context of human-computer interaction research in co-located group interfaces and learning technologies.

Kevin Harris' sixth grade class has a mission; they need to find out why there are more red flowers in certain areas of a large field. Mr. Harris breaks up the class into groups to explore different parts of the field. When the children come upon a flower, they place a flag in the ground to mark the spot and record its position and colour using a pocket PC that doubles as a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. They do all of this at an ImmersaDesk/sup TM/ in their school. Once all of the data is collected, the students meet as a group in their classroom to integrate and visualize it. Patterns that are not visible while collecting the data suddenly appear when that data is visualized as a whole. Using MyWorld, a geographic information system for high-school students, filters are applied to the data to make the patterns more obvious. This collaboration combines the VR educational work at the University of Illinois at Chicago with the desktop educational work at Northwestern University. It is part of a larger NSF funded project including the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech developing guidelines and an engineering process to support software developers in building effective computer-based learning environments.

This paper presents our findings after the first year and a half of a multi-year deployment of an ImmersaDesk/sup (R)/ to a local elementary school, investigating its effectiveness in enhancing science education. These findings deal with how VR can aid in the coordination of multiple representations, and how to integrate the technology into the existing school culture.

A distributed immersive virtual environment was deployed as a component of a pedagogical strategy for teaching third grade children that the Earth is round. The displacement strategy is based on the theory that fundamental conceptual change requires an alternative cognitive starting point which doesnt invoke the features of pre-existing models. While the VR apparatus helped to establish that alternative framework, conceptual change was strongly influenced by the bridging activities which related that experience to the target domain. Simple declarations of relevance proved ineffective. A more articulated bridging process involving physical models was effective for some children, but the multiple representations employed required too much model-matching for others.

The Round Earth Project is investigating how virtual reality technology can be used to help teach concepts that are counter-intuitive to a learner's currently held mental model. Virtual reality can be used to provide an alternative cognitive starting point that does not carry the baggage of past experiences. In particular this paper describes our work in comparing two strategies for teaching young children that the Earth is spherical when their everyday experiences tell them it is flat.

The Graphic StoryWriter (GSW) is an interactive system that enables its users to create structurally complete stories through the manipulation of graphic objects in a simulated storybook. A rule-based story engine manages character and prop interaction, guides story development, and generates text. Through the simple interface and story writing engine, the Graphic StoryWriter provides an environment for early readers to learn about story structures, to experience the relationship between pictures and text, and to experiment with causal effects. This paper describes the motivation for and design of the Graphic StoryWriter, and reports on an empirical comparison of childrens' stories generated orally and using the GSW.

Article Free Access Share on Effective "static-graph" reorganization to improve locality in garbage-collected systems Authors: Paul R. Wilson Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348 (m/c 154) Chicago, Illinois Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348 (m/c 154) Chicago, IllinoisView Profile , Michael S. Lam Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348 (m/c 154) Chicago, Illinois Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348 (m/c 154) Chicago, IllinoisView Profile , Thomas G. Moher Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348 (m/c 154) Chicago, Illinois Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348 (m/c 154) Chicago, IllinoisView Profile Authors Info & Claims PLDI '91: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1991 conference on Programming language design and implementationMay 1991 Pages 177–191https://doi.org/10.1145/113445.113461Published:01 May 1991Publication History 83citation592DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations83Total Downloads592Last 12 Months39Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In a single-subject study of a software developer working in an object-oriented programming environment, we found evidence of a development style characterized by pervasive software reuse. The subject employed regular strategies for template selection and coding in her work, and avoided techniques requiring deep understanding of code details or symbolic execution whenever possible. Within the limits of the design of the study, the subject's performance is related to attributes of object-oriented programming and our interpretation of the mature mental model with which she approached her task.

The Opportunistic Garbage Collector (OGC) is a generational garbage collector for stock hardware and operating systems. While incorporating important features of previous systems, the OGC includes several innovations. A new bucket brigade heap organization supports advancement thresholds between one and two scavenges, using only two or three spaces per generation, and without requiring per-object counts. Opportunistic scavenging decouples scavenging from the filling of available memory, in order to hide potentially disruptive scavenge pauses and improve efficiency. Card marking efficiently records which small areas of the heap may contain pointers into younger generations, and is supported by a refinement of the crossing map technique, to enable scanning of arbitrary cards.

Demonic memory is a form of reconstructive memory for process histories. As a process executes, its states are regularly checkpointed, generating a history of the process at low time resolution. Following the initial generation, any prior state of the process can be reconstructed by starting from a checkpointed state and re-executing the process up through the desired state, thereby exploiting the redundancy between the states of a process and the description of that process (i.e., a computer program).

An 11-week training program aimed principally at graduate and postdoctoral students in computationally intensive fields is described. The program is designed to provide a balance between the specificity of computing center courses, the abstractness of computer science courses, and the personal contact of traditional apprentice approaches. It consists of seminars and clinics given by many visiting and local faculty and covers a variety of supercomputing concepts, issues, and practices related to architecture, operating systems, software design, numerical considerations, code optimization, graphics, communications, and networks. Its research component encourages understanding of scientific computing and supercomputer hardware issues. Flexibility in thinking about computing needs is emphasized by the use of several different supercomputer architectures.>

The author introduces PROVIDE, a source-level process visualization and debugging environment currently under development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. PROVIDE is a modern coding and debugging environment that is designed to allow the user to configure interaction at a desired level of abstraction. It emphasizes the use of interactive computer graphics for the illustration of program execution, with special attention to the requirements of program debugging. The major features of PROVIDE are presented, especially the concepts of deferred-binding program animation, which allows users to interactively change the depiction of program execution during the debugging task, and process history consistency maintenance, which guarantees a consistent (automatically updated) record of program execution in the face of changes to program instructions and run-time data values. The current PROVIDE prototype is implemented on Macintosh workstations networked to a VAX 11/780 running 4.2 BSD Unix.>