Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) incorporating tangible graspable objects are becoming more accessible for training and other applications. Visual and proprioceptive information has been shown to be important for accurate distance and size perception. However, previous research has shown that users overestimate the size of tangible objects in IVEs. To address this issue, researchers have demonstrated the use of calibration to alter users' perceptions. In this study, we examined the carryover effects of calibration on the perceived size of graspable dials in IVEs. Participants wore head-mounted displays and experienced two calibration perturbations: Divergent Plus (physical dials 10% larger than virtual) and Divergent Minus (physical dials smaller than virtual). These were compared to the baseline Convergent condition (equal diameters). The results showed significant effects of the calibration on the accuracy of diameter estimates. Overall, a higher overestimation of dial sizes for the haptics-only condition was observed as compared to the vision-only condition. Additionally, participants' estimations worsened when haptic information was added to the vision during calibration but improved when vision information was added to the haptics-only condition during calibration. These findings highlight the importance of calibration in improving the accuracy of size perception in IVEs and contribute to our understanding of how tangible graspable objects are perceived in immersive virtual environments.

This paper discusses the challenge of teaching Digital Twins in computing courses focuses on three key dimensions: emerging technological, economic, and cultural factors; trends likely to influence the educational, professional, and sociocultural experiences of students, educators, and society at large; and a forward-looking vision for the future of computing education. To address these dimensions, the paper proposes a set of adaptable course syllabi designed to align with the specific needs, goals, and institutional contexts of diverse academic environments. These proposals aim not only to introduce students to the foundational principles of Digital Twins but also to foster critical engagement with their broader implications for innovation, interdisciplinarity, and ethical practice in computing.

Pedagogical Conversational Agents (PCAs) are increasingly used to provide personalized support in digital learning. This study examines how different levels of learner control that a virtual teaching assistant (TA) offered impact students' self-efficacy, learning effectiveness, and satisfaction, given the moderating effects of student characteristics. A between-subjects study with 215 students across three learner control conditions revealed that the moderate control (i.e., Assisted Inquiry) led to higher perceived learning effectiveness than the high control. Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Openness were found to significantly influence students' learning. These findings underscore the need for adaptive PCA systems that tailor instructional support with scaffolding and balanced learning interventions while accounting for learners' personality traits to enhance student engagement and perceived learning effectiveness.

Virtual humans (i.e., embodied conversational agents) have the potential to support college students’ mental health, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields where students are at a heightened risk of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression. A comprehensive understanding of students, considering their cultural characteristics, experiences, and expectations, is crucial for creating timely and effective virtual human interventions. To this end, we conducted a user study with 481 computer science students from a major university in North America, exploring how they co-designed virtual humans to support mental health conversations for students similar to them . Our findings suggest that computer science students who engage in co-design processes of virtual humans tend to create agents that closely resemble them demographically—agent-designer demographic similarity. Key factors influencing virtual human design included age, gender, ethnicity, and the matching between appearance and voice. We also observed that the demographic characteristics of virtual human designers, especially ethnicity and gender, tend to be associated with those of the virtual humans they designed. Finally, we provide insights concerning the impact of user-designer demographic similarity in virtual humans’ effectiveness in promoting mental health conversations when designers’ characteristics are shared explicitly or implicitly. Understanding how virtual humans’ characteristics serve users’ experiences in mental wellness conversations and the similarity-attraction effects between agents, users, and designers may help tailor virtual humans’ design to enhance their acceptance and increase their counseling effectiveness.

This research paper explores the prevalence of the Impostor Phenomenon (IP) among undergraduate college students in computer science (CS) courses, addressing its variations concerning different student demographics such as gender, ethnicity, and institutional background. We surveyed 502 students from two Southeastern U.S. institutions-one in Georgia and one in Florida-using the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS). We found that 63% of our participants reported experiencing IP, with higher rates among female students (68%) compared to males (62 %) and those of other gender identities (46 %). Our findings also suggest that IP experiences are significantly influenced by the interplay of students' gender and their institutional context. At the first institution (Georgia Institute of Technology), IP was found in 58% of female students and 65% of male students, compared to 29% among students with other gender identities. At the second institution (University of Florida), these figures were 80% for females, 57% for males, and 67% for students with other gender identities. Our study underscores the importance of developing targeted support strategies within the CS education community to address the high prevalence of IP, particularly considering its varying impact across different demographics and institutional contexts.

We describe iterations on the design of a hexagonal token and constraint tangible and cyberphysical interface. Our system has been co-designed both for use in tangible, embedded, embodied interaction and extended reality classroom contexts, and within broader applied generalizations. We survey some of the related literature in hexagonal, rectangular, and triangular tangible interfaces. We express a design space characterizing several aspects of these prior systems; and apply these to a number of additional virtual and physical iterations. We accompany our text with 3D printable, circuit board, and virtual models for a number of these interactors, usable in both tangible and purely virtual forms, including versions engaging four different embedded computing platforms (Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi Pico, Adafruit Circuit Playground, and Blinks). We discuss experiences from use of these in classroom settings, and steps toward broader applications.

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) enables the creation of user-centric applications where the user has complete control over his data. This research evaluates the performance of SSI-based applications. This work proposed an architecture based on the Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries frameworks, deployed it in a cloud environment, and executed its empirical evaluation. The results indicate that the bottleneck is the CPU; a simple setup can support up to 80 concurrent users without relevant errors and 120 simultaneous users before system degradation. Finally, we discuss the system bottlenecks and possible optimization techniques.

Virtual humans (VHs) have the potential to support mental wellness among college computer science (CS) students. However, designing effective VHs for counseling purposes requires a clear understanding of students’ demographics, backgrounds, and expectations. To this end, we conducted two user studies with 216 CS students from a major university in North America. In the first study, we explored how students co-designed VHs to support mental wellness conversations and found that the VHs’ demographics, appearance, and voice closely resembled the characteristics of their designers. In the second study, we investigated how the interplay between the VH’s appearance and voice impacted the agent’s effectiveness in promoting CS students’ intentions toward gratitude journaling. Our findings suggest that the active participation of CS students in VH design leads to the creation of agents that closely resemble their designers. Moreover, we found that the interplay between the VH’s appearance and voice impacts the agent’s effectiveness in promoting CS students’ intentions toward mental wellness techniques.

Counseling requires intimacy between a counselor and a patient to reach healing and growth. However, building rapport between virtual human counselors and computing college students is a complex problem. It requires understanding students' experiences and goals, as also the effects the characteristics of a virtual human counselor, like the spoken accent, have in the interaction with a patient in regards to messenger credibility and self-disclosure. This paper reports findings of how virtual human counselors' spoken accents impact computing undergraduate students' mental wellness conversations in regard to students' self-reported multilingual skills: monolingual or multilingual. We developed two English-speaking rapport-building virtual humans, each with a different spoken English accent-American or German, to interview 62 North American undergraduate computing students from a North American campus. Our findings suggest that virtual humans' spoken accents impacted students' perceptions of the virtual humans' speaking skills. Additionally, we found a similarity-attraction effect between monolingual English speakers and the American-English-accented virtual human counselor concerning participants' engagement and perceptions of the virtual human's speaking skills.

Virtual human interactions are increasingly used for empathy skills training in healthcare by providing feedback during or after the interaction. The post-interview feedback consists of evaluation results of users' empathic responses and can be provided once without interfering with the interaction. However, this type of feedback is insufficient to engage trainees in obtaining a deeper understanding and insights into their learning. The scaffolded ping-pong feedback consists of a multi-round of descriptions explaining how to formulate desired empathic responses to induce users to explore an understanding of how to respond empathically. To increase the training effectiveness to enhance users' expressed empathy, we studied how to apply scaffolded ping-pong feedback in virtual human interactions to train users' empathy skills. In this paper, we studied how different forms of feedback impact users learning how to express empathy to screen-based virtual humans. To evaluate the training effectiveness, we collected 638 empathic responses from 27 clinician participants in the interaction with two virtual patients integrated with scaffolded ping-pong feedback. We compared them with 809 empathic responses from 25 clinician participants in the post-interview condition. The result shows that the scaffolded ping-pong feedback helped clinician participants to provide a higher percentage of medium-empathy level and a lower percentage of low-empathy level empathic responses than the post-interview feedback. The scaffolded ping-pong feedback was perceived as more difficult to use but did not affect the overall interaction experience with virtual patients. This work demonstrates the applicability of integrating ping-pong feedback to strengthen the training effectiveness of virtual human education interventions.

Learning how to program is perceived by many college students as difficult. Factors that influence novices’ success in computer programming learning include the student’s mental model of programming, computer playfulness during training, and programming anxiety. Programming anxiety (PA) is a psychological state engendered when a student experiences or expects to lose self-esteem in confronting a programming task. Students’ achievements have been seen to be negatively affected by programming anxiety. Others have investigated storytelling and tangible block programming to facilitate learning programming skills, but such efforts did not focus on analyzing their effects on users’ anxiety toward programming. In this work, we present fableBlocks, a tangible block-based programming (BBP) environment that relies on storytelling to mitigate programming anxiety. We adapted an existing BBP environment to incorporate storytelling. In a comparative pilot study, fableBlocks outdid a conventional GUI-based environment in usability and user-experience scores. Although not statistically significant, participants demonstrated lower levels of PA with fableBlocks.

Simulating real-world experiences in a safe environment has made virtual human medical simulations a common use case for research and interpersonal communication training. Despite the benefits virtual human medical simulations provide, previous work suggests that users struggle to notice when virtual humans make potentially life-threatening verbal communication mistakes inside virtual human medical simulations. In this work, we performed a 2x2 mixed design user study that had learners (n = 80) attempt to identify verbal communication mistakes made by a virtual human acting as a nurse in a virtual desktop environment. A virtual desktop environment was used instead of a head-mounted virtual reality environment due to Covid-19 limitations. The virtual desktop environment experience allowed us to explore how frequently learners identify verbal communication mistakes in virtual human medical simulations and how perceptions of credibility, reliability, and trustworthiness in the virtual human affect learner error recognition rates. We found that learners struggle to identify infrequent virtual human verbal communication mistakes. Additionally, learners with lower initial trustworthiness ratings are more likely to overlook potentially life-threatening mistakes, and virtual human mistakes temporarily lower learner credibility, reliability, and trustworthiness ratings of virtual humans. From these findings, we provide insights on improving virtual human medical simulation design. Developers can use these insights to design virtual simulations for error identification training using virtual humans.

In the context of mental wellness support, trust and intimacy between a counselor and a patient are necessary to converge healing processes positively. However, convincing students to trust a virtual human for topics regarding mental wellness is a complex problem that requires understanding students' experiences. Based on research that discusses mental health as a concerning topic regarding Computer Science (CS) students, this paper investigates how undergraduate computing-related students perceive virtual humans' expertise on mental wellness support based on demographic resemblance on spoken accent and gender. Four virtual human counselors were developed to conduct the study, as 58 undergraduate computing-related students from two North American universities were recruited and assessed. Our findings suggest that students were less inclined to interact with a male virtual human than a female one. Also, that spoken accents can impact students' perceptions of expertise under students' multilingualism.

Prototyping electronic circuits is often facilitated by web-based tutorials and breadboards. Several virtual and hybrid platforms do exist, each carrying their own limitations. Some of these platforms fall prey to split-attention effects, wherein users are required to split their attention to integrate multiple sources of spatially separated information. This hinders the learning and prototyping processes. Other platforms provide a single source of information, but lack tangible interaction with electronic components or suffer from the absence of active feedback which can also hinder these processes. There is hence a need for prototyping platforms that mitigate split attention effects, while continuing to provide other desirable aspects such as tangible interaction. To address this, we present three editions of PPCards, a card-based platform for prototyping electronic circuits, towards overcoming limitations of existing paradigms. Through a comparative study, it was determined that the first edition of PPCards outdid the conventional breadboard web-based tutorial paradigm in aspects of split attention, usability, and user experience. The second and third editions build upon successful characteristics of the first, additionally provisioning support for multimedia content and real-time feedback during the prototyping process. Based on quantitative data and qualitative feedback, we go on to discuss design considerations for future tangible card-based tools.

Block-based programming is typically based solely on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Some approaches, however, provide tangible interaction. They usually allow users to create block programs with GUIs to control physical robots or use physical blocks to create programs displayed on a vertical display. With these systems, users split their attention between the GUI and the physical objects. Split-attention effects have been shown to increase task completion time and hinder learning. BlockXR applies projected augmented reality and computer vision to provide users with tangible interaction for programming and feedback in the same plane. A comparative study with a GUI-based system determined that BlockXR scored significantly higher in the user experience scores of Attractiveness, Stimulation, and Novelty. We found no significant differences between usability scores. In this work, we describe the system and the quantitative and qualitative feedback from an user study.

Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) incorporating tangibles are becoming more accessible. The success of applications combining 3D printed tangibles and VR often depends on how accurately size is perceived. Research has shown that visuo-haptic perceptual information is important in the perception of size. However, it is unclear how these sensory-perceptual channels are affected by immersive virtual environments that incorporate tangible objects. Towards understanding the effects of different sensory information channels in the near field size perception of tangibles of graspable sizes in IVEs, we conducted a between-subjects study evaluating the accuracy of size perception across three experimental conditions (Vision-only, Haptics-only, Vision and Haptics). We found that overall, participants consistently over-estimated the size of the dials regardless of the type of perceptual information that was presented. Participants in the haptics only condition overestimated diameters to a larger degree as compared to other conditions. Participants were most accurate in the vision only condition and least accurate in the haptics only condition. Our results also revealed that increased efficiency in reporting size over time was most pronounced in the visuo- haptic condition.

This report investigates how clinician-participants react to virtual patients’ sensical vs. nonsensical responses in a training simulation that aims to help clinicians acquire empathetic skills toward high-risk patients with symptoms of the Suicide Crisis Syndrome (SCS). Two suicidal virtual patients were developed, and clinician-participants interactions with them were recorded. Their facial emotions were analysed in three key moments: after a baseline sensical response, after a nonsensical response, and after the following sensical response. We compared their basic facial emotions aggregated into Negative and Positive facial affective behaviors (FABs). We describe our study involving ten clinician-participants and the results of the facial expression analysis with Noldus FaceReader. Our results suggest that nonsensical responses from virtual humans have an overall impact in both Positive and Negative facial affective emotions, and may lead to an increased percent of time participants demonstrate Negative facial affective behaviors when interacting with virtual humans. We discuss several aspects regarding the impacts and importance of considering nonsensical responses in the context of virtual human-based interactions.

This paper investigates the process of automating the evaluation of empathetic response levels in virtual human interaction systems implementing mental health scenarios. Two suicidal virtual patients were developed to collect clinician participants' empathetic responses. Before collecting clinicians' responses, we tested the virtual human interaction with healthcare trainees. Trainees' empathetic responses were evaluated by experts to use the ECCS scale based on the ECCS level (Empathetic Communication Coding System). We trained classifiers using trainees' empathetic responses with experts' coded empathy levels as the training dataset. Clinician participants' empathetic responses to virtual patients were evaluated by experts and the classifiers. The performance of the classifiers was evaluated using the experts' coded level of clinicians' empathetic responses as a test dataset.

Research on tangible user interfaces commonly focuses on tangible interfaces acting alone or in comparison with multi-touch or graphical interfaces. In contrast, hybrid approaches can be seen as the norm for established "mainstream'' interaction paradigms. In my work, I propose interfaces that support complementary interaction modalities, representational forms and scales, toward hybrid systems which are more legible and actionable than any strategy considered separately. I describe systems involving dial-like tangibles, which are passive and active, and systems combining interaction modalities such as tangible and multi-touch, and tangible and VR interaction. I briefly describe some of the planned and performed evaluations, and draw lessons from an already completed study involving a computationally-mediated scientific poster platform with content developed by undergraduate students.

Research on tangible user interfaces commonly focuses on tangible interfaces acting alone or in comparison with multi-touch or graphical interfaces. In contrast, hybrid approaches can be seen as the norm for established "mainstream" interaction paradigms. This paper proposes interfaces that support complementary use of physical and virtual interaction modalities with tangible and multi-touch interactions. We describe prototypes involving capacitively-sensed surfaces combined with laser-cut and 3D-printed dial-like tangibles. We employ them in the context of several computationally-mediated scientific poster scenarios, which we argue to have a number of attractions for such deployments. We present two platforms: one templated, the other highly customizable, supporting both tangible and multi-touch interactions across horizontal and vertical displays. We explore users' interaction modality choice among the options presented, draw lessons and challenges from posters developed by students, and consider future directions.