Practice is essential for learning. There is evidence that solving Parsons problems (putting mixed up code blocks in order) is a more efficient, but just as effective, form of practice than writing code from scratch. However, not all students successfully solve every Parsons problem. Making the problems adaptive, so that the difficulty changes based on the learner's performance, should keep the learner in Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and maximize learning gains. This paper reports on a study comparing the efficiency and effectiveness of learning from solving adaptive Parsons problems vs non-adaptive Parsons problem vs writing the equivalent code. The adaptive Parsons problems used both intra-problem and inter-problem adaptation. Intra-problem adaptation means that if the learner is struggling to solve the current problem, the problem can dynamically be made easier. Inter-problem adaptation means that the difficulty of the next problem is modified based on the learner's performance on the previous problem. This study provides evidence that solving intra-problem and inter-problem adaptive Parsons problems is a more efficient, but just as effective, form of practice as writing the equivalent code.

Many new technologies for children focus on fostering learning. However, designers and researchers often come from disparate traditions that either stress innovative design methodologies (e.g. participatory design) or rigorous examination of learning (e.g., design-based research). This workshop brings together researchers who are actively engaged in, or interested in, weaving together these research fields to develop usable, engaging, and innovative technologies that are also deeply grounded in theories of learning. We invite participants to submit position papers describing their work in progress. The goals of the workshop will be to better articulate the unique issues that arise at the intersection of interaction design and learning design, and develop an agenda for a next wave of research that draws a clear link between methodologies in these fields. All topic areas related to design, learning, and children are welcome.

The increasingly cross-generational use of personal technology portrays families each absorbed in individual devices. Tablets potentially support multi-user working but are currently used as personal devices primarily for consumption, or individual or web-based games. Could tablets support creative co-located groupwork in families and how does such creative work differ from the same task on paper? We designed and evaluated an app requiring individual and group co-creation in families. 262 family groups visiting a science fair played the collaborative drawing game on paper and iPads. Group creations were rated significantly more original and cohesive on iPads than paper. Detailed video analysis of seven family groups showed how tablets support embodiment and use of digital traces, and how the different media sustain individual and shared actions at different stages in the creative process. We sketch out implications for ownership and 'scrap computers': going beyond personally-owned devices and developing collaborative apps to support groupwork with tablets.

Everyday computing technology is transitioning from PCs to more natural user interfaces. At the forefront of this trend are multi-touch tablets. Each year, tablets become more affordable, capable and widespread. Now is the time for research to shape how they will be used to support learning. In this paper, I introduce the Proportion tablet application as both a concrete vision of how tablets can be used to support co-located collaborative learning and as a research platform for investigating that possibility. I motivate the work, describe how the design has evolved and outline the questions this design-based research aims to address.

Children are not necessarily motivated to collaborate if no common ground can be found. In this paper, we present t-vote, a system supporting children's decision making. To encourage collaboration in a museum's context, we employ tangible pawns on a tabletop interface and implicitly script the decision making process of children. We describe the system design, our design process, and rationale.

Previous research has demonstrated the capacity of interactive table-tops to support co-located collaborative learning; however, these analyses have been at a coarse scale---focusing on general trends across conditions. In this paper, we offer a complimentary perspective by focusing on specific group dynamics. We detail three cases of dyads using the DigiTile application to work on fraction challenges. While all pairs perform well, their group dynamics are distinctive; as a consequence, the benefits of working together and the benefits of using an interactive tabletop are different for each pair. Thus, we demonstrate that one size does not fit all when characterizing how interactive tabletops support collaborative learning.

This paper introduces Quadratic---a virtual manipulative for two people to explore algebraic expressions on an interactive tabletop. Users assemble rectangles out of fundamental components: 1, x, and x2. As the area of a rectangle is both the product of its sides and the sum of its components, users can explore how the product of two linear expressions (the rectangle's sides) equals a quadratic equation (the rectangle's area). This virtual manipulative adds several important features to the previously existing physical manipulative: 1) negative pieces; 2) multiple palettes; 3) multiple linked representations between the visual elements, the equivalent algebraic expression, and the graph of that expression; 4) the ability to provide feedback on posed challenges.

Interactive tabletops are an exiting new platform for supporting children's collaboration. With design guidelines and standardized interaction principles still immature, there is a considerable need for iterative prototyping to define the task and interface. Lo-fi prototypes---using cardboard, paper, etc.---are easy to develop, flexible to adjust during design sessions, and intuitive for users to manipulate. Using them can be a valuable step in designing tabletop applications.

Efficiently entering text on interactive surfaces, such as touch-based tabletops, is an important concern. One novel solution is shape writing - the user strokes through all the letters in the word on a virtual keyboard without lifting his or her finger. While this technique can be used with any keyboard layout, the layout does impact the expected performance. In this paper, I investigate the influence of keyboard layout on expert text-entry performance for stroke-based text entry. Based on empirical data, I create a model of stroking through a series of points based on Fitts's law. I then use that model to evaluate various keyboard layouts for both tapping and stroking input. While the stroke-based technique seems promising by itself (i.e., there is a predicted gain of 17.3% for a Qwerty layout), significant additional gains can be made by using a more-suitable keyboard layout (e.g., the OPTI II layout is predicted to be 29.5% faster than Qwerty).

Applications running on multi-touch tabletops are beginning to be developed to enable children to collaborate on a variety of activities, from photo sharing to playing games. However, little is know as to how children work together on such interactive surfaces. We present a study that investigated groups of children's use of a multitouch tabletop for a shared-space design task, requiring reasoning and compromise. The OurSpace application was designed to allow children to arrange the desks in their classroom and allocate students to seats around those desks. A number of findings are reported, including a comparison of single versus multiple touch, equity of participation, and an analysis of how a child's tabletop position affects where he or she touches. A main finding was that children used all of the tabletop surface, but took more responsibility for the parts of the design closer to their relative position.

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

In this paper, we describe our experience with the long-term, widespread use of CoWeb, an asynchronous collaborative tool that is mostly used to complement existing face-to-face groups (such as classes). The CoWeb is an openended tool that does not enforce or explicitly support specific roles or usage, yet several well-defined uses and roles have emerged over time. In our design methodology, we recognize these roles and refine our collaboration environment to better support them.