We present a mobile phone based cricket game for improving the spoken English pronunciation of school children designed and tested within a specific socio-cultural context in rural India, the Mewat district of Haryana State. The development of the game concept was informed by a field study, which identified the cultural restrictions respected by the community as well community interests and motivations. The game was accessible using a low-end mobile phone and evaluated with a group of 63 students from classes 4 and 5 of a rural school. The results suggest that the cricket game can be effectively used to engage students and to improve their spoken English skills in the given setting. Further, the game serves as an informative example of how factors impacting the acceptability and appropriation of a technology in a particular setting can be taken into account from the very beginning of the design process.

This paper describes the concepts behind and implementation of the multimedia art work Alan01 / AlanOnline, which wakes up the 1952 criminally convicted Alan Turing as a piece of code within the art work- thus fulfilling Turing's own vision of preserving human consciousness in a computer. The work's context is described within the development of associative storytelling structures built up by interactive user feedback via an image and video retrieval system. The input to the retrieval system is generated by Alan01 / AlanOnline via their respective sketch interfaces, the output of the retrieval system being fed back to Alan01 / AlanOnline for further processing and presentation to the user within the context of the overall artistic experience. This paper, in addition to presenting the productions and image retrieval system, also presents the installation and online production user reception and some of the issues and observations made during the development of the systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors