Understanding how children perceive and interact with teachable agents (systems where children learn through teaching a synthetic character embedded in an intelligent tutoring system) can provide insight into the effects of so-cial interaction on learning with intelligent tutoring systems. We describe results from a think-aloud study where children were instructed to narrate their experience teaching Stacy, an agent who can learn to solve linear equations with the student's help. We found treating her as a partner, primarily through aligning oneself with Stacy using pronouns like you or we rather than she or it significantly correlates with student learning, as do playful face-threatening comments such as teasing, while elaborate explanations of Stacy's behavior in the third-person and formal tutoring statements reduce learning gains. Additionally, we found that the agent's mistakes were a significant predictor for students shifting away from alignment with the agent.

We present a curriculum for computer science outreach using Game Maker. This curriculum has been adapted over six iterations of a 10-week, middle school apprenticeship on Game Design and Development. Through multiple iterations we have adjusted for many of the issues one could expect to encounter when running a similar outreach program. While many outreach curricula are independent from coursework, our video game design curriculum is targeted to address generalized student learning objectives (Math and English Language Arts) and designed for integration into middle school classrooms. We demonstrate that students' language arts and math classroom performance have improved with participation in this apprenticeship.

Walking is only possible within immersive virtual environments that fit inside the boundaries of the user's physical workspace. To reduce the severity of the restrictions imposed by limited physical area, we introduce "impossible spaces," a new design mechanic for virtual environments that wish to maximize the size of the virtual environment that can be explored with natural locomotion. Such environments make use of self-overlapping architectural layouts, effectively compressing comparatively large interior environments into smaller physical areas. We conducted two formal user studies to explore the perception and experience of impossible spaces. In the first experiment, we showed that reasonably small virtual rooms may overlap by as much as 56% before users begin to detect that they are in an impossible space, and that the larger virtual rooms that expanded to maximally fill our available 9.14 m x 9.14 m workspace may overlap by up to 31%. Our results also demonstrate that users perceive distances to objects in adjacent overlapping rooms as if the overall space was uncompressed, even at overlap levels that were overtly noticeable. In our second experiment, we combined several well-known redirection techniques to string together a chain of impossible spaces in an expansive outdoor scene. We then conducted an exploratory analysis of users' verbal feedback during exploration, which indicated that impossible spaces provide an even more powerful illusion when users are naive to the manipulation.

We present change blindness redirection, a novel technique for allowing the user to walk through an immersive virtual environment that is considerably larger than the available physical workspace. In contrast to previous redirection techniques, this approach, based on a dynamic environment model, does not introduce any visual-vestibular conflicts from manipulating the mapping between physical and virtual motions, nor does it require breaking presence to stop and explicitly reorient the user. We conducted two user studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the change blindness illusion when exploring a virtual environment that was an order of magnitude larger than the physical walking space. Despite the dynamically changing environment, participants were able to draw coherent sketch maps of the environment structure, and pointing task results indicated that they were able to maintain their spatial orientation within the virtual world. Only one out of 77 participants across both both studies definitively noticed that a scene change had occurred, suggesting that change blindness redirection provides a remarkably compelling illusion. Secondary findings revealed that a wide field-of-view increases pointing accuracy and that experienced gamers reported greater sense of presence than those with little or no experience with 3D video games.

In this poster we will detail our experience leading a ten-week apprenticeship in Game Design and Development for a group of Middle School students. This apprenticeship is lead in association with the national after-school program, Citizen Schools and is intended to both educate students about Computer Science concepts while imparting real-world job skills.

One of the primary goals of attending academic conferences is professional networking, yet even though this interaction can increase one's feeling of community within a field, conference attendees are not interacting as much as they could be. Similarly, it's known that students who do not feel as if they are part of a larger academic community are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities and organizations, lowering retention rates. To combat both of these problems, we present SNAG (Social Networking and Games). SNAG is a suite of mobile and Internet games which aim to facilitate social networking between members of a group, and can be used in either a conference setting or within a university. This paper focuses on one specific game, Snag'em, and discusses our evaluation for our SNAG games.

Children with autism show substantial benefits from rigorous physical activity, however it is often difficult to motivate these individuals to exercise due to their usually sedentary lifestyles. To address the problem of motivation, we have developed Astrojumper, a stereoscopic virtual reality exergame which was designed to fit the needs of children with autism. During the game, virtual space-themed objects fly forward toward the user who must use their own physical movements to avoid collisions. Preliminary playtesting of Astrojumper on neuro-typical participants has been positive, and we plan to run an extensive evaluation assessing the psychological and physiological effects of this system on children with and without autism.

We present a technique for exploiting change blindness to allow the user to walk through an immersive virtual environment that is much larger than the available physical workspace. This approach relies on subtle manipulations to the geometry of a dynamic environment model to redirect the user's walking path without becoming noticeable. We describe a virtual environment which was implemented both as a proof-of-concept and a test case for future evaluation. Anecdotal evidence from our informal tests suggest a compelling illusion, though a formal study against existing methods is required to evaluate the usefulness of this technique.

We report a series of experiments conducted to investigate the effects of travel technique on information gathering and cognition in complex virtual environments. In the first experiment, participants completed a non-branching multilevel 3D maze at their own pace using either real walking or one of two virtual travel techniques. In the second experiment, we constructed a real-world maze with branching pathways and modeled an identical virtual environment. Participants explored either the real or virtual maze for a predetermined amount of time using real walking or a virtual travel technique. Our results across experiments suggest that for complex environments requiring a large number of turns, virtual travel is an acceptable substitute for real walking if the goal of the application involves learning or reasoning based on information presented in the virtual world. However, for applications that require fast, efficient navigation or travel that closely resembles real-world behavior, real walking has advantages over common joystick-based virtual travel techniques.

This paper presents the design of the final stage of a new game currently in development, entitled cMotion, which will use virtual humans to teach emotion recognition and programming concepts to children. Having multiple facets, cMotion is designed to teach the intended users how to recognize facial expressions and manipulate an interactive virtual character using a visual drag-and-drop programming interface. By creating a game which contextualizes emotions, we hope to foster learning of both emotions in a cultural context and computer programming concepts in children. The game will be completed in three stages which will each be tested separately: a playable introduction which focuses on social skills and emotion recognition, an interactive interface which focuses on computer programming, and a full game which combines the first two stages into one activity.

We report on a study in which we investigate the effects of travel technique on simulator sickness in a real and virtual environment. Participants explored either a real maze or a virtual maze using either natural walking or simulated walking. Reported scores for measures of overall simulator sickness, disorientation, nausea, and occulomotor discomfort were all higher in the natural walking condition than either the simulated walking or real world conditions. This indicates that simulated walking is a better choice for reducing simulator sickness during tasks requiring a navigationally complex environment and a long amount of time.