Sleuth is a gamified platform developed as a practical tool for teaching introductory programming to large student cohorts. It focuses on building fluency through repeated practice whilst developing syntactic and conceptual knowledge. The platform is currently used for online and campus-based teaching with around 1200 active students at any given time. In this paper we discuss Sleuth as an iterative testbed for empirically testing theoretical considerations around gamification and automated feedback generation. Further to this, we introduce ongoing research investigating effects of varying feedback types on student attainment and optimising student progression.

Television companion apps on tablets and smartphones provide interactive content synchronized with TV shows. A key design question raised by this novel, multi-display, multimedia interface is whether the app's role is to be a synopsis of the show or a supplement. In other words, should the app help viewers better follow what they are watching on TV, or offer additional enriching content to respond to interest created by the show? We developed a companion app for a documentary with both synoptic and supplementary content. A laboratory study with 28 participants examined the effect of these different types of content on the experience of using the companion and the effect on engagement with the show in terms of participants' recall. Engagement with the show was not affected by supplementary content in the app but coordinated viewing of both screens was more difficult. Design guidelines evident from these results are discussed.

This paper reports and discusses the findings of an exploratory study into collaborative user practice with a multiscreen television application. MarathOn Multiscreen allows users to view, share and curate amateur and professional video footage of a community marathon event. Our investigations focused on collaborative sharing practices across different viewing activities and devices, the roles taken by different devices in a viewing ecology, and observations on how users consume professional and amateur content. Our Work uncovers significant differences in user behaviour and collaboration when engaged in more participatory viewing activities, such as sorting and ranking footage, which has implications for awareness of other users' interactions while viewing together and alone. In addition, user appreciation and use of amateur video content is dependent not only on quality and activity but their personal involvement in the contents.

There has been a massive growth in the number of people who film and upload amateur footage of events to services such as Facebook and Youtube, or even stream live to services such as LiveStream. We present an exploratory study that investigates the potential of these spectators in creating footage en masse; in this case, during a live trial at a local marathon. We deployed a prototype app, RunSpotRun, as a technology probe to see what kinds of footage spectators would produce. We present an analysis of this footage in terms of its coverage, quality, and contents, and also discuss the implications for a) spectators enjoying the race, and b) extracting the stories of individual runners throughout the race. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that remain for deploying such technology at a larger scale.