Although digital storytelling bears significant benefits for older users, much remains to be explored regarding their psychosocial attributes that could affect technology acceptance. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in the field and since its first introduction, there have been numerous studies upon its potential modifications throughout different cultures. Based on three factors that have been extensively depicted in age-related literature (chronological age, loneliness, and future time perspective), in this research, we designed a TAM extension in order to gain insights on the elements that influence Greek older adults’ intentions to use online storytelling applications. Through a quantitative approach, we evaluated the proposed model with data collected from 112 participants. Due to our results, TAM has been validated as a robust model, future time perspective had a positive influence on perceived ease of use, while age and loneliness had no statistically significant effect.

Contemporary research has explored educational robotics, but it has not examined the development of computational thinking in the context of programming embodied interactions. Apart from the goal of the robot and how the robot will interact with its environment, another important aspect that should be taken into consideration is whether and how the user will physically interact with the robot. We recruited 36 middle school students to participate in a six-session robotics curriculum in an attempt to expand their learning in computational thinking. Participants were asked to develop interfaces for the remote control of a robot using diverse interaction styles from low-level to high-level embodiment, such as touch, speech, and hand and full-body gestures. We measured students’ perception of computing, examined their computational practices, and assessed the development of their computational thinking skills by analyzing the sophistication of the projects they created during a problem-solving task. We found that students who programmed combinations of low embodiment interfaces or interfaces with no embodiment produced more sophisticated projects and adopted more sophisticated computational practices compared to those who programmed full-body interfaces. These findings suggest that there might be a tradeoff between the appeal and the cognitive benefit of rich embodied interaction with a remotely controlled robot. In further work, educational robotics research and competitions might be complemented with a hybrid approach that blends the traditional autonomous robot movement with student enactment.

Pedagogy has emphasized that physical representations and tangible interactive objects benefit learning especially for young students. There are many tangible hardware platforms for introducing computer programming to children, but there is limited comparative evaluation of them in the context of a formal classroom. In this work, we explore the benefits of learning to code for tangible computers, such as robots and wearable computers, in comparison to programming for the desktop computer. For this purpose, 36 students participated in a within-groups study that involved three types of target computer platform tangibility: (1) desktop, (2) wearable, and (3) robotic. We employed similar blocks-based visual programming environments, and we measured emotional engagement, attitudes, and computer programming performance. We found that students were more engaged by and had a higher intention of learning programming with the robotic rather than the desktop computer. Furthermore, tangible computing platforms, either robot or wearable, did not affect the students’ performance in learning basic computational concepts (e.g., sequence, repeat, and decision). Our findings suggest that computer programming should be introduced through multiple target platforms (e.g., robots, smartphones, wearables) to engage children.

During the last few years, the focus of computer science education (CSE) in primary and secondary schools (shortly K-12) have reached a significant turning point. This study reviews the published papers on the field of K-12 computing education in order to summarize the findings, guide future studies and give reflections for the major achievements in the area of CSE in K-12 schools. 47 peer-reviewed articles were collected from a systematic literature search and analyzed, based on a categorization of their main elements. Programming tools, educational context, and instructional methods are the main examined categories of this research. Results of this survey show the direction of CSE in schools research during the last years and summarized the benefits as well as the challenges. In particular, we analyzed the selected papers from the perspective of the various instructional methods aiming at introducing and enhancing learning, using several programming tools and educational context in K-12 CSE. Despite the challenges, the findings suggest that implementing computing lessons in K-12 education could be an enjoyable and effective learning experience. In addition, we suggest ways to facilitate deep learning and deal with various implications of the formal and informal education. Encouraging students to create their own projects or solve problems should be a significant part of the learning process.

The information conveyed via the social media, in addition to the content data, also contains social characteristics that come from the social network users. A special interesting data category concerns the data that come from the natural language present in the social media mainly in the form of video. Our study focuses on the speech content of the videos in the form of transcript and the opinion of the social network users that have watched them. The representation of content data is made through a vector space model that uses cosine similarity measure for the relevant ranking of the transcripts. In order for the ranking to be more comprehensive we suggest the addition of a new parameter that of social weight during the procedure, which will reflect the users' opinion. There is an analytic presentation of the method being suggested; all the possible cases are being examined and the rules that define the new ranking are put forward. Furthermore, we apply this method to video lectures derived from YouTube. The findings of the experiments show that the addition of the social weight parameter reflects the users' views without changing to great extent the content based ranking of the video lectures. Finally, a user evaluation experiment was carried out and showed that the ranking procedure that includes the social weight parameter is closer to the users' ranking preferences.

Teachers have employed online video as an element of their instructional media portfolio, alongside with books, slides, notes, etc. In comparison to other instructional media, online video affords more opportunities for recording of student navigation on a video lecture. Video analytics might provide insights into student learning performance and inform the improvement of teaching tactics. Nevertheless, those analytics are not accessible to learning stakeholders, such as researchers and educators, mainly because online video platforms do not share broadly the interactions of the users with their systems. As a remedy, we have designed an open-access video analytics system and employed it in a video-assisted course. In this paper, we present a longitudinal study, which provides valuable insights through the lens of the collected video analytics. In particular, we collected and analyzed students' video navigation, learning performance, and attitudes, and we provide the lessons learned for further development and refinement of video-assisted courses and practices.

Video learning analytics are not open to education stakeholders, such as researchers and teachers, because online video platforms do not share the interactions of the users with their systems. Nevertheless, video learning analytics are necessary to all researchers and teachers that need to understand and improve the effectiveness of the video lecture pedagogy. In this paper, we present an open video learning analytics service, which is freely accessible online. The video learning analytics service (named Social Skip) facilitates the analysis of video learning behavior by capturing learners' interactions with the video player (e.g., seek/scrub, play, pause). The service empowers any researcher or teacher to create a custom video-based experiment by selecting: 1) a video lecture from You Tube, 2) quiz questions from Google Drive, and 3) custom video player buttons. The open video analytics system has been validated through dozens of user studies, which produced thousands of video interactions. In this study, we present an indicative example, which highlights the usability and usefulness of the system. In addition to interaction frequencies, the system models the captured data as a learner activity time series. Further research should consider user modeling and personalization in order to dynamically respond to the interactivity of students with video lectures.

Video lectures are nowadays widely used by growing numbers of learners all over the world. Nevertheless, learners' interactions with the videos are not readily available, because online video platforms do not share them. In this paper, we present an open-source video learning analytics system, which is also available as a free service to researchers. Our system facilitates the analysis of video learning behavior by capturing learners' interactions with the video player (e.g, seek/scrub, play, pause). In an empirical user study, we captured hundreds of user interactions with the video player by analyzing the interactions as a learner activity time series. We found that learners employed the replaying activity to retrieve the video segments that contained the answers to the survey questions. The above findings indicate the potential of video analytics to represent learner behavior. Further research, should be able to elaborate on learner behavior by collecting large-scale data. In this way, the producers of online video pedagogy will be able to understand the use of this emerging medium and proceed with the appropriate amendments to the current video-based learning systems and practices.

The International Workshop on Analytics on Video-based Learning (WAVe2013) aims to connect research efforts on Video-based Learning with Learning Analytics to create visionary ideas and foster synergies between the two fields. The main objective of WAVe is to build a research community around the topical area of Analytics on video-based learning. In particular, WAVe aims to develop a critical discussion about the next generation of analytics employed on video learning tools, the form of these analytics and the way they can be analyzed in order to help us to better understand and improve the value of video-based learning. WAVe is based on the rationale that combining and analyzing learners' interactions with other available data obtained from learners, new avenues for research on video-based learning have emerged.

This article investigates the uses and gratifications of the popular social networking site Facebook. In the exploratory stage, 70 users generated phrases to describe the manner they used Facebook. Interestingly, some users not only described the uses, but also mentioned how they perceive these uses. These phrases were coded into 14 items and clustered into four factors. The principal component analysis that was conducted in the third stage of the study, which was addressed to 222 Facebook users, verified the validity of the four factors: Social Connection, Social Network Surfing, Wasting Time and Using Applications. Previous user studies on Facebook have examined the immediate social effects of this popular social networking site, but they have not regarded emerging uses of the platform, such as gaming and applications, which do have a social component as a feature and not as a core principle. The ‘Wasting Time’ factor and the growth of ‘Using Applications’ factor indicate that Facebook has already become an integral part of daily computing routine, alongside with the rest of the entertainment desktop and web applications.

Educational video games have been employed by teachers in order to make educational software more attractive to students. However, limited research has been made on the design and assessment of the storytelling elements and the educational effectiveness of these games in sciences curricula. For this purpose, we used Scratch to develop a storytelling mathematics video game and then we measured its educational effect to a small group of twelve students. We found that the story-based math video game has captivated the interest of students and it has been beneficial in the improvement of their performance in an assessment test. Most notably, the improvement was higher for students who used to have poor performance in mathematics. In practice, educators should develop similar games for similar science topics (e.g., physics, chemistry, etc), while further research should consider the active involvement of students in the design of serious games.

The introduction and wide adoption of small and powerful mobile computers, such as smart phones and tablets, has raised the opportunity of employing them into multi-device scenarios and blending the distinction between input and output devices. In particular, the partnership between a personal device and a shared one provides two possible output screens. Then, one significant research issue is to balance the visual interface between two devices with advanced output abilities. Do the devices compete or cooperate for the attention and the benefit of the user? Most notably, how multi-device interaction is appreciated in multi-user scenarios? Previous research has raised and considered the above research issues and questions for dual screen set-ups in the work environment. In our research, we are exploring multi-device user interface configurations in the context of a leisure environment and for entertainment applications. Our objective is to provide interaction possibilities that are more than the sum of the parts.

Interactive Television (ITV) applications gratify entertainment needs and leisure activities in a relaxed domestic context. Then, the mentality of efficiency and task completion implied by many user interface heuristics may not be suitable for design and expert evaluation of ITV. In line with the contemporary movement towards the design of the user experience of computing systems, a set of design principles for ITV applications has been developed. Instead of information technology, the field of communication science was explored, which has accumulated an extensive theory of TV usage and viewer behavior. For the empirical validation, the principles were employed in the design of an interactive music TV application. The results suggest that a small set of generic principles could support the systematic design of ITV applications and produce a design rationale that is traceable and comparable to alternative solutions, during the process of early product development. In addition, the principles could be refined into specific guidelines and further employed to support expert evaluation techniques.

Previous research on the social impact of communication technologies has followed two distinct directions and has considered independently either the interpersonal communication or the mass communication. In this context, the human–computer interaction aspects of integrated media and social communication are examined. The design of “Social TV” systems that support interpersonal communication, which is motivated by mass media consumption and which takes place within colocated groups or over distance, is explored. In terms of the temporal dimension, Social TV might be synchronous, which happens in real time, or asynchronous, which happens with a time difference. This article provides an overview of research findings and outlines evaluation methods and user requirements for usability and sociability in interactive TV.

Interactive digital television is an emerging field with a high impact in our societies: it offers interactive services to the masses. This tutorial aims to establish a common framework by summarizing the most significant results in this multidisciplinary field. The review includes topics such as content distribution, system software of the receivers, and user interaction. In addition, we will discuss current commercial events such as the next generation of optical discs (e.g., blue-ray), BBC peer-to-peer service, and mobile television. Based on this discussion, we will formulate an agenda for further research. The agenda includes, for example, end-user enrichment of television content and social television. This half-day tutorial will provide the attendee a solid understanding of the technologies currently in use and an introduction of the open questions in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to present our experience from the design of a personalized television application, and the implications for the design of interactive television applications in general. Personalized advertising is a gentle introduction to interactive television applications through a push paradigm that is closer to the established patterns of television use. While personalization is a practice widely used on the Internet, applying personalization techniques over digital television infrastructures presents significant obstacles, which we address with explicit design moves