In computational Making, Makers integrate areas like electronics and 3D fabrication with computation. When used for learning formal subjects like science, computational Making adds not only interdisciplinary content but also embodied, hands-on interaction that supports conceptual understanding. However, integrating these different areas to advance a Making-for-learning activity is non-trivial. While research has explored student engagement in Making, we lack an understanding of how students link knowledge across disciplines during these activities. This study investigates whether and how 5th and 6th-grade students in a public school create interdisciplinary linkages in computational Making activities for science learning. Drawing from 340 hours of classroom video data, we analyzed student connections across science, Making, and computing to understand how and in what contexts they emerged. Our findings reveal how hands-on experimentation and embodied metaphors contribute to disciplinary integration. We discuss implications for the design of computational Making activities to better support interdisciplinary learning in the classroom.

Situated Cognition Theory (SCT) has been widely used to ground designs of technology-based educational interventions. SCT argues that knowledge is inherently tied to the social, cultural and physical context of its acquisition. Hence, learning should be most effective when it takes place in authentic real-world contexts. While SCT has been studied for app design, most literature focuses solely on the social context. This study investigates the physical situatedness aspect of SCT in relation to everyday science learning from mobile apps. A mobile app, Objectica, was designed applying the idea of physical situatedness. A week-long between-subjects study with 56 participants compared Objectica with a control app. Results showed significant differences in learner engagement and motivation between the two apps, but no impact on learning. This study thus provides some evidence for the effectiveness of using SCT in educational mobile app designs based on physical situatedness, but also raises questions about its applicability.

Educators have perpetually strived to make learning content relevant to students. One way to create this relevance is contextualizing instruction with students’ out-of-classroom experiences. Out-of-classroom experiences happen in-the-world and are embodied experiences that are more likely to be of interest to students. However, integrating out-of-classroom experiences is non-trivial, placing additional burden on the teacher when designing lesson plans. We posit that technology in the form of teacher-facing lesson-planning interfaces can facilitate this effort. To be able to design such interfaces, we need understanding of how teachers contextualize their lessons leading to design insights. We carried out a series of design workshops to understand how teachers integrate students’ out-of-classroom experiences into their lesson plans. In this paper, we present results from the design workshops that lead to an understanding of teachers’ current approaches as well as the synthesis of design insights.

Maker-based learning and Computational Thinking (CT) have increased in popularity in formal educational settings over the past decade. Particularly, the combination of CT and making seem to hold promise for providing opportunities for students to learn and use computing concepts outside of computing courses. This paper presents findings from a two year study of the integration of computational making into 5th and 6th grade science classrooms. Students participated in computational making interventions in which they programmed Arduino microcontrollers to create scientific models of concepts that aimed to help them engage with the science content while learning CT and making skills. In this paper, we explore the differences between the desired computing learning progressions, students' performance on assessments, and perceptions of computer science to answer: To what extent are middle school students able to learn computing through computing integrated science curriculum? We observed that the programming concepts taught were largely dependent on the needs of the science and making project. Our findings suggest that while students had opportunities to learn and use programming concepts, their performance on assessments was between 15% and 78% correct for conceptual and applied questions and their programming self-efficacy and their perceptions of computer science were lower than desired. We discuss the implications of these findings and the factors that impact the integration of CT in core disciplines and the challenges this presents as we aim to use integration approaches to effectively teach computing outside of computing courses and to broaden participation in computing.

Educational recommender systems (RS) have become widely popular with the paradigm shift to online learning and the availability of a wide variety of learning resources. Educational RS in various education platforms use a wide variety of filtering techniques. This has led to the development of multiple types of RS. Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) are identified as an emerging type of RS that uses users' context for filtering recommendations, which makes recommendations more relevant to the user's current situation. CARS may face initial distrust compared to other RS due to the additional automation layer of context awareness and the use of more user data. Therefore, we conduct a survey-based study to find differences in user trust and perception between CARS and other RS. In the study, users viewed examples of CARS and RS. The results show that users have significantly lower trust in CARS compared to RS.

Learning through web browsing, often termed Search-as-Learning (SaL), can create information overload, due to thousands of search results. SaL can be made more efficient by developing context-aware tools that recommend items to the user and minimize information overload. However, to use context-aware recommender systems (CARS) users need to trust it. Literature has proposed explanations as a feature that helps to build trust. We investigate the impact of explanation on user trust and user experience for using CARS for SaL. Our study results show that people trust a CARS without explanation more during the first use, but for a CARS with explanations, user trust is significant only after multiple uses. Through interviews, we also uncovered the interesting paradox that even though users do not perceive that explanations add to their learning outcomes, they still prefer to use a CARS with explanations over one without.

Contextualization in education connects learning material to students' experiences and background knowledge to make it relevant and meaningful. It involves placing content in a real-world context to show students the practical applications and relevance of the concepts they are learning. Contextualizing is an important pedagogical strategy. In order to support teachers in this effort, it is necessary to understand what contexts to provide for teachers to make relevant instruction in certain situations. In this paper, we aim to explore: In what context do teachers need students' everyday life experiences to make the class more relevant to students? We conducted focus groups with teachers who shared their contextualizing experiences. The context for contextualizing refers to the information used to characterize the situation in the classroom and the experiences of the students. The results of this research include the three categories of context information, time, activity, and location, that are relevant to the lesson and the students' prior experiences related to these factors. Design implications are discussed in this paper to illustrate how adaptive teacher support systems can provide relevant and meaningful information to the teachers by considering context information and students' prior experiences.

In this poster, we present the design of a browser-based Arduino programming tool, CASMM, to support computational thinking and making in science classrooms. This tool allows for unique integration of research tools, lesson planning, and scaffolding for learning computational thinking concepts and block-based programming. This poster will describe four key features of a block-based LMS: (1) reduced-scoped programming toolbox, (2) block locking, (3) lesson plans and starter code templates; and (4) low-tech code replay for researchers. Through discussion of this tool, we aim to catalyze conversations about integrating new scaffolding techniques into block-based programming environments to better support classroom use and research.

This paper presents the design of a browser-based Arduino programming tool and learning management system (LMS), CASMM, that offers end-to-end support for learners utilizing Chromebooks in a classroom environment. This tool aims to support learners through the entire process of coding and using Arduinos in group projects at scale in formal classrooms. The novelty of this tool and its discussion for the VL/HCC community lies in the design and customization of this tool to meet real world constraints of formal classrooms. In addition, it encourages expansion of who we consider users and requires inclusion of where and how learning takes place to truly support human-centered development of programming tools. In this paper, we shift the focus from individual users to multiple groups of student users and 1–3 teachers/mentors in a classroom environment. In particular, this paper aims to make explicit the unique needs of teachers and students who may have limited technology expertise both in coding and using Arduinos in formal classroom environments, the human and technological constraints of a formal classroom and features we've designed into CASMM to address these needs. Through this paper, we aim to spark discussion about the human-centered requirements of these users and how tools that support learners end-to-end in the development process may be necessary to truly provide accessible programming languages and environments for a wide range of novices (i.e., students, classroom teachers, and college mentors/volunteers).

Transitioning from the military to the civilian lifestyle, especially for military veterans who decide to pursue careers in the civilian workforce, is often a difficult experience. The job interview, a task in which the interviewees meet and discuss their skills and career goals with strangers in a position of authority, is the first step of assimilation into the civilian workplace, which might cause them to experience nervousness or anxiety. This feeling of excessive stress may compromise the interviewee's performance, therefore potentially impeding their successful transition to the workforce. Intelligent interview training technologies would benefit from automated stress detection systems that could assist interviewees in better understanding causes and antecedents of stressors during their interaction with the interviewer. This paper examines self-reported and bio-behavioral measures of stress experienced during mock job interviews conducted with 24 U.S. military veterans. Self-reported measures were captured via a global measure of stress reported by the participant at the conclusion of the interview, and a continuous moment-to-moment annotation of stress resulting from the retrospective inspection of the interview video recording. Bio-behavioral indices of stress include physiological reactivity measures captured via electrodermal activity and electrocardiogram signals, as well as acoustic measures extracted from speech. Results indicate that physiological reactivity measures exhibit moderate-to-strong correlation with self-reported measures of stress, and can be thus used to estimate the self-reported stress measures. Augmenting the feature space with demographic and psychological traits can further improve the accurate detection of stress during the interviews.

Supporting children’s writing activities is a primary concern in elementary-school grades. Using embodied means such as visual stimuli through pictures or motion pictures has been shown effective in supporting children’s writing. To guide children during the writing activity, contextual cues are usually provided in face-to-face classroom practice with interactive instruction from a teacher. This paper explores the design of an interactive online system for video-scaffolded writing with contextual cues. In our online study with 13 children, we explored two approaches to designing contextual cues: temporally situated and visually situated. Participants were divided into two groups, each using a web-based interface to watch an animated video and write the story guided by one of the cue designs. We analyzed the children’s writing process and outcome in both groups. Our results show that temporally situated cues support a stronger overall story structure, while visually situated cues support more descriptive and interpretive writing.

Much of formal and informal learning has moved online in the past decade. However, online learning has a host of problems with lack of motivation in students leading the way. Interest-based learning (IBL) is a paradigm of instruction where students’ interests are used as the basis of learning content. While IBL has been researched and used in physical educational settings, it is challenging to implement in an online setting since it typically requires intense instructor involvement with individual students. This paper investigates an approach to implementing IBL for video-based online learning (VBOL) through a chatbot A preliminary interview study along with a main within-subjects study was conducted. Results showed that participants had greater interest, found more enjoyment, value, and usefulness, and were generally more motivated to learn with the IBL chatbot than through traditional VBOL. We discuss the implications of these results and their broader impacts on online learning.

Physical computing toolkits for children expose young minds to the concepts of computing and electronics within a target activity. To this end, these kits usually make use of a custom Visual Programming Language (or VPL) environment that extends past the functionality of simply programming, often also incorporating representations of electronics aspects in the interface. These representations of the electronics function as a scaffold to help the child focus on programming, instead of having to handle both the programming and details of the electronics at the same time. This paper presents a review of existing physical computing toolkits, looking at the What, How, and Where of electronics representations in their VPL interfaces. We then discuss potential research directions for the design of VPL interfaces for physical computing toolkits for children.

Many story authoring tools have been designed to support children’s creativity through story enactment. However, at school, children are encouraged to engage in formal modes of expression, such as writing. This paper aims to explore how we may design tools that support children in writing using body-based enactment as a scaffold. In our study, 17 children used an interactive story authoring system to enact and record stories as videos and then write the stories while viewing them. We compared the story enactment videos and the corresponding written story essays in terms of the narrative structure, content, and coherence. Our results show a significant difference in story structure in the two formats and a marginally significant difference in the coherence ratings. We present our findings in terms of learned lessons for designing children’s enactment-based authoring tools to encourage more substantial written outcomes.

During instruction, using information that is directly relevant to students within a lesson creates a more personalized lesson that may better resonate with the students. However, in a class, each student has highly varied individual experiences and it is untenable for the teacher to remember all of the experiences. Furthermore, teaching already involves substantial multitasking that may be quite cognitively overwhelming, even with non-personalized lessons. Therefore, providing support to the teacher to incorporate students’ individual experiences is crucial to enable truly personalized teaching. We propose that visualizing students’ individual experiences for the teacher during instruction may help him or her adapt the lesson in real-time to the students in the class. This paper investigates the kind of visualization that would enable a teacher to uptake a student’s experiences the most effectively. We conducted a within-subjects study to assess the impact that three forms of visualization (plain text, graphical mind map, and story illustration) would have on visual efficiency during a hypothetical teaching scenario. Visual efficiency was measured in terms of response accuracy, response time, and mental effort. Results suggested that visual efficiency can be improved by using proper visualization design. We discuss the implications for supporting real-time personalized instruction.

With advances in areas such as sensors and machine learning, wearable technologies will have increased potential to support our daily lives. Even though today’s landscape of smart wearable devices is highly varied, the real-world adoption of wearables has remained lukewarm. We propose that a key reason is that we currently only have a surface-level understanding of people’s interaction behaviors with wearable devices. A deeper understanding of user behaviors toward different wearable devices will help to inform wearable design for more seamless user experiences. We present an empirical study with 50 participants that explore people’s micro-behaviors toward five types of smart wearable devices (wristband, ring, clip, necklace, glasses) in a lab-based information-gathering context. A micro-analysis of participants’ session videos and interviews showed that people have different behaviors and attitudes in terms of affordances and functionality for different forms of wearables giving rise to a variety of design implications.

People use a significant amount of gestures when engaging in creative brainstorming. This is especially typical for creative workers who frequently convey ideas, designs, and stories to team members. These gestures produced during natural conversation contain information that is not necessarily conveyed through speech. This paper investigates the design of a system that uses people's gestures in natural communication contexts to produce external visualizations of their mental imagery, focusing on gestures that describe dimension-related information. While much psycholinguistics research address how gestures relate to the representations of concepts, little HCI work has explored the possibilities of harnessing gestures to support thinking.

Storytelling is a critical step in the cognitive development of children. Particularly, this requires children to mentally project into the story context and to identify with the thoughts of the characters in their stories. We propose to support free imagination in creative storytelling through an enactment-based approach that allows children to embody an avatar and perform as the story character. We designed our story creation interface with two modes of avatar: the story-relevant avatar and the self-avatar, to investigate the effects of avatar design on the quality of children's creative products. In our study with 20 child participants, the results indicate that self-avatars can create a stronger sense of identification and embodied presence, while story-relevant avatars can provide a scaffold for mental projection.

It is becoming increasingly common for intelligent systems, such as recommender systems, to provide explanations for their generated recommendations to the users. However, we still do not have a good understanding of what types of explanations work and what factors affect the effectiveness of different types of explanations. Our work focuses on explanations for movie recommender systems. This paper presents a mixed study where we hypothesize that the type of explanation, as well as user motivation for watching movies, will affect how users respond to recommendation system explanations. Our study compares three types of explanations: i) neighbor-ratings, ii) profile-based, and iii) event-based, as well as three types of user movie-watching motivations: i) hedonic (fun and relaxation), ii) eudaimonic (inspiration and meaningfulness), and iii) educational (learning new content). We discuss the implications of the study results for the design of explanations for movie recommender systems, and future novel research directions that the study results uncover.

Movie recommender systems help users to navigate the magnitude and diversity of movies that people have easy access to nowadays, especially with online streaming services. However, current systems personalize recommendations primarily based on what they think a specific user would like or prefer using information about how similar the users are to other users. Prior work has suggested that this could lead to a ‘filter bubble’ whereby users only watch movies that they are comfortable with. This paper presents the novel concept of event-inspired movies that draw on users’ highly specific everyday life experiences to recommend movies that are meaningful to them. To conduct the study, we developed a systematic process to align movies with viewer variables. Meaningful movies have been said to have therapeutic potential to possibly affect one’s sense of overall well-being. We conducted a study with 24 participants to explore how users engage with event-inspired movies, whether event-inspired movies are perceived as more relevant, and their potential to affect users’ sense of life satisfaction. In so doing, we also contribute a process and insights on how to operationalize event-inspired movies that can inform the implementation of a movie recommender system situated within the proposed paradigm.

Although much has been written about the benefits of situated learning, its technology implementations have remained bounded in space and time in the form of scheduled sessions or designated spaces. Relatively little research has investigated how learning can be situated in the messy world outside of formal learning contexts. We propose that wearables like smartwatches, because of their intrinsic attributes such as persistence and ease-of-access, present an apt opportunity to explore how such 'messy' situated learning can happen. This paper investigates the notion of context in a 3-week study whereby 18 elementary school students used a custom smartwatch app called ScienceStories to record reflections related to specific science topics throughout the course of their everyday lives.

Our work is concerned with how embodied communication involving speech and gestures may be mediated through mobile tele-robotics and augmented reality to support hands-on distance mentoring. Following work in the psycholinguistics of embodied communication (e.g., meaning is expressed through gesture, gaze, and speech), a four design-implement-test-deploy-evaluate study was undertaken. We investigated whether and how powerful multimodal language to support explanation and mentoring may be mediated over distance through the designs.

With increasing focus on integrating 3D printing in educational settings, more emphasis needs to be placed on how to introduce young students to the complexities of the 3D printing process. Inspired by the patrons of 3D printer services, we engage children in a simplified 3D printing process. We conducted a study with two 3rd grade public school science classes over 4 days, where students were tasked to print 3D designs they find online for use in a class presentation. Initial findings identify challenges within this process, and show indications of emerging interest towards 3D printing.

Relatively little research exists on the use of smartwatches to support learning. This paper presents an approach for commodity smartwatches as a tool for situated reflection in elementary school science. The approach was embodied in a smartwatch app called ScienceStories that allows students to voice record reflections about science concepts anytime, anywhere. We conducted a study with 18 fifth-grade children to investigate first, the effects of ScienceStories on students' science self-efficacy, and second the effects of different motivational structures (gamification, narrative-based, hybrid) designed into the smartwatch app on students' quality and quantity of use. Quantitative results showed ScienceStories increased science self-efficacy especially with a motivational structure. The gamified version had the highest quantity of use, while narrative performance performed worst. Qualitative findings described how students' recordings related to science topics and were contextualized. We discuss how our findings contribute to understanding of how to design smartwatch apps for educational purposes.

This paper extends the concept of digital literacy and applies it to Making. Through case descriptions, we contribute an understanding of how children can become or fail to become individuals literate in Making within a formal learning context. Our analysis draws from video recordings and other data sources of two 4th grade classrooms in which the students, who had already participated in 1.5 years of more structured 'makified activities', engaged in an open-ended, exploration-based, and playful task that was more in line with the spirit of Making. Student teams were classified as 'high in Making literacy' and 'low in Making literacy', revealing how Making literacy was expressed at the level of skills, mental models, and practices in various ways for different students. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates what burgeoning Making literacy may mean in a public elementary school classroom, paving the way for a vision of a time when Making becomes generalized practice.

Prior research investigating the effects of incorporating Making into educational contexts has been limited to snapshot studies. These studies however do not allow for the investigation of aspects that require longer-term development and nurture. We present a longitudinal study that investigates the effects of Making on children's degree of science self-efficacy, identity formation as possible scientists and engineers, and academic performance in science. Designed interactions with Making technology were integrated into the science curriculum of elementary school classrooms in a public school with a high proportion of students from minority populations for a year. Results showed significant differences between the "Making classrooms" and the control classrooms, and from pre- to post-test on the students' inclination towards science. The results support the promise and potential of incorporating Making into formal schooling on the growth and long-term attitudes of children towards science and STEM in general.

Little is understood on how to design wearables for education, especially for children. We explore how smartwatches may allow children to see the world through the lens of science. In our study, 20 children are tasked to record stories related to specific scientific concepts in their daily life and drawing from their embodied experiences using a commodity smartwatch. Our findings describe the types of "science stories" that the children capture through the smartwatch, and how the stories relate to science. From our findings, we elicit seven areas of future research needed to catalyze the design of wearable apps to support informal science learning for children.

We present Making activities designed and observed within the formal environment of elementary school classrooms. Using a collaborative curriculum-matching design process with teachers, 8 Maker activities and lesson plans were developed, and implemented in Science and Language Arts classrooms of a school with a large percentage of students from underrepresented populations, over the course of 18 weeks during one semester. Coded videos revealed three categories of Maker activities: those that enabled learning, demonstrated learning, and provided learning of the concept itself. Experiences of teachers and students also revealed eagerness to participate, engagement, and exploration in the activities, as observed in a series of analyses. Other themes include the importance of multi-sensory exploration and ownership of self-constructed apparatuses with electronics. The resulting Maker activities and lesson plans offer strategies for familiarizing students with electronic tools and fostering tinkering while remaining true to the learning standards of the classroom.

The study of Making to support children's cognitive or social needs is gaining prominence rapidly. However, little research in Making focuses on children's motor skills and abilities, especially at younger ages. Arguing that Making provides greater benefits when introduced at elementary school-aged, this paper contributes to the understanding of how children aged 8 to 11 manipulate connectors, a key component of Maker kits. We present a review of connectors used in prior work, a theoretical foundation based on the mediated action theory of affordances, and an empirical study of children using 6 different types of connectors with various affordances. Based on quantitative analysis and qualitative video analysis, we present themes that may guide the design of components in future Maker kits for children, with a view towards usability aligned with children's capabilities and mental models.

Based on an intensive semester-long study of designing and implementing curriculum-based Maker activities in 6 classes, this paper presents themes derived from a qualitative analysis of experience data using the framework of Activity Theory. Insights generated contribute to the understanding of the integration of Making into elementary schools at a systemic level.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of materiality in tangible interaction design for children. We specifically target children aged 4 to 6 years old because of societal trend of early exposure to touch screen devices for children. This study compares three types of material (felt, wood, and plastic) for tangibles along with touch-based interaction and how the differences implicate child art creation on an iPad application. Through mixed-methods analysis of twenty-six participants' experiences, we use data sources of video recordings, drawings, and interview. The main finding looked at the hardness of materiality for physical and digital drawing tools and its influence to digital art drawings. The findings from this study may be applied to design tangible user interfaces for young children.

At around age nine when social awareness and self-evaluation heighten, children experience a precipitous slump in creative engagement. We propose an enactment-based approach grounded in embodied cognition theories to support children's creative self-efficacy and creative thinking in storytelling during the period of this slump. Our investigation of the approach with 20 children indicated that enactment-based animated authoring improves children's sense of self-efficacy in creating stories, particularly for children with low to medium extraversion, and enables children to produce richer stories, especially for children who scored low on the baseline creativity test.

This paper presents Touch Wire, a learning environment for teaching the basics of electricity and electronic design to young children. Touch Wire combines a digital touch screen interface with tangible components to bring the concepts of electronic circuitry to the forefront, while removing the tedium of tasks such as wiring for young children. Grounded in constructivist theories of learning, Touch Wire will overlay information about the underlying electrical mechanics on the tablet interface to scaffold children's learning of electronics. Our demonstrations have given us insight into how to best move forward developing the blended tangible and graphical interfaces of Touch Wire to both enhance the fun experience for children and support their learning of electronic circuitry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how young children associate materiality and meanings and how it can benefit tangible interaction design. To study this, we developed a research prototype, Stampies, that allows playful tangible interactions. Stampies consists of tangible objects made out of different materials (wood, felt, silicone, and plastic) and an iPad drawing application. We describe results from our empirical study involving 19 children aged 4 to 7. The study indicates that children associate materials with meanings through "material essences", feel, and tactile preference. We conclude with design implications for tangible interaction for children.

Animated stories are challenging to produce for the novice adult, let alone for children. Research into how to facilitate the creation of animations for children is an ongoing effort. In this paper, we propose the concept of performative authoring which taps into the power of children's pretend play to allow them to create animations through body enactments. We review the literature on animation authoring systems focusing on children, propose the new concept of performative authoring that uses enactment as a mode of story authoring, and describe the design of DiME, an exemplar system embodying performative authoring. We report on a pilot study that was conducted with the system.

This paper investigates how the presentation of contextual visual images may influence a child's imagination during the use of authoring systems to create digital content. This issue is particularly significant to understand what supports the child's creativity in authoring systems in creative storytelling. We address specifically children aged 8 to 10 because of the "FourthGrade Slump" phenomenon whereby children experience a decrease in creative engagement at this period. We carried out a study in which children used a storytelling system that allows the user to physically enact stories in a digitallyaugmented space contextualized by either a contextual background image or a blank screen. Using methods of video coding and analysis, we uncovered themes relating differences between children's enactment in the presence of a digital background and without in terms of both the process and product of storytelling. We discuss implications that the themes have for the design of story authoring systems for children.

How does the physicality of an object impact creativity? Our work investigates how objects that possess affordances varying in perceptual and manipulative specificity affect the imagination of the elementary school child. The use of three different kinds of objects was compared: cultural, physical and across three objects (frying pan, pickaxe, lantern) by children enacting parts of a story. We measure the child's 'broader imagination'. Results showed that the physical object type provides better support to extend the imagination of the 9-year old child. There were however gender differences that suggest differing affinity to specific objects. We discuss how our results inform the design of tangibles for enactment-based story authoring systems.

This paper investigates the effects of physical objects as support for imagination in the context of enactive storytelling. More specifically, we target nine-year-old children because of their general disengagement from creative activity, a phenomenon known as the Fourth-grade Slump that arises from a demotivational spiral brought on by social awareness. We study how enactment using physical objects may allow the child to better engage in story imagination. Our study compares the richness of the imagination under three main enactment conditions with objects that have varying degrees of fidelity to referent objects: Cultural objects (physical visual resemblance); Physical objects (similar physical affordances); Arbitrary objects (minimal physical and visual affordances). We employ a mixed-methods analysis to gauge the child's level of broader imagination from three data sources: Enactment videos, drawings and interviews with the children. We found that the object types significantly differ in their support of the imagination, with the object of highest specificity being most effective. Our findings can inform the design of embodied creativity-support systems for children.

Technological devices are being rapidly adopted into schools for education, but we have limited understanding of the value and ways through which the devices can benefit learning. As opposed to research placing the value of these devices in terms of digitality, we make use of theories of embodiment to under-stand how the physicality of the devices can support learning and sensemaking. We conducted a month-long study to collect data on students' strategies, patterns, attitudes and behaviors toward the use of a suite of devices, for the completion of a course assignment. Themes uncovered include the objectification of information, the immediate awareness of possibilities, an expectation of interaction, coherence of interaction and territorialization of technology spaces. We present a model for the role of physicality of devices with regards to educational activities, and argue for the need to construct a digital ecology to provide a cohesive experience of learning.

The Fourth Grade Slump, whereby children's creativity drops precipitously at around fourth grade, is a developmental phenomenon that begs for research to be done on ways to nurture children's creativity. We posit that due to its form and formal features, the use of the animated medium for creative activities can positively sustain the child's creativity throughout the Slump. We present a study that investigated how the animated medium (animation) mediates and influences the creative process of children in the third and fourth grade, using the digital print medium (storybook) as comparison. Analysis of the process was done at the structural and production level using mainly the method of discourse analysis.

10.1145/1753326.1753424