Much of the work done in the field of tangible interaction has focused on creating tools for learning; however, in many cases, little evidence has been provided that tangible interfaces offer educational benefits compared to more conventional interaction techniques. In this paper, we present a study comparing the use of a tangible and a graphical interface as part of an interactive computer programming and robotics exhibit that we designed for the Boston Museum of Science. In this study, we have collected observations of 260 museum visitors and conducted interviews with 13 family groups. Our results show that visitors found the tangible and the graphical systems equally easy to understand. However, with the tangible interface, visitors were significantly more likely to try the exhibit and significantly more likely to actively participate in groups. In turn, we show that regardless of the condition, involving multiple active participants leads to significantly longer interaction times. Finally, we examine the role of children and adults in each condition and present evidence that children are more actively involved in the tangible condition, an effect that seems to be especially strong for girls. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

Most programs today are written not by professional software developers, but by people with expertise in other domains working towards goals for which they need computational support. For example, a teacher might write a grading spreadsheet to save time grading, or an interaction designer might use an interface builder to test some user interface design ideas. Although these end-user programmers may not have the same goals as professional developers, they do face many of the same software engineering challenges, including understanding their requirements, as well as making decisions about design, reuse, integration, testing, and debugging. This article summarizes and classifies research on these activities, defining the area of End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) and related terminology. The article then discusses empirical research about end-user software engineering activities and the technologies designed to support them. The article also addresses several crosscutting issues in the design of EUSE tools, including the roles of risk, reward, and domain complexity, and self-efficacy

This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into a diverse set of subjects in middle school, including the development of tutorials, example worlds and lesson plans. In the summer of 2008 our experiences with middle school teachers included three-weeks of training in Alice and guidance in the development of lesson plans. Our experiences with middle school students involved two one-week summer camps of instruction in Alice. We found both the teachers and the students strongly engaged with Alice. The teachers created lesson plans with Alice worlds to interactively teach a topic and other lesson plans in which students build an Alice world on a particular topic either from scratch or using a template world. The students in the Alice camps had both instruction in Alice and free time to develop Alice worlds of their choice. We found that the students used a large variety of basic Alice concepts and computer science concepts in the worlds they built in their free time.

This paper examines the distribution, adoption, and evolution of an open-source hardware toolkit we developed called the LilyPad Arduino. We track the two-year history of the toolkit and its user community from the time the kit was commercially introduced, in October of 2007, to September of 2009. Using sales data, publicly available project documentation, and text from user forums and surveys, we explore the relationship between the LilyPad and its adopters. We investigate the community of developers who has adopted the kit (paying special attention to gender), explore what people are building with it, describe how user feedback impacted the development of the kit and examine how and why people are contributing their own LilyPad-inspired tools back to the community. What emerges is a portrait of a new technology and a new engineering/design community in co-evolution.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

Most programs today are written not by professional software developers, but by people with expertise in other domains working towards goals for which they need computational support. For example, a teacher might write a grading spreadsheet to save time grading, or an interaction designer might use an interface builder to test some user interface design ideas. Although these end-user programmers may not have the same goals as professional developers, they do face many of the same software engineering challenges, including understanding their requirements, as well as making decisions about design, reuse, integration, testing, and debugging. This article summarizes and classifies research on these activities, defining the area of End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) and related terminology. The article then discusses empirical research about end-user software engineering activities and the technologies designed to support them. The article also addresses several crosscutting issues in the design of EUSE tools, including the roles of risk, reward, and domain complexity, and self-efficacy

Little is known about the formation of people’s first perceptions about computers and computer code, yet it is likely that these impressions have a lasting effect on peoples ’ use of technology in their lives and careers. Brief autobiographical essays about these first impressions were solicited from a diverse population of young adults and these essays were analyzed for factors that contributed to positive and negative attitudes about technology, formation of self-efficacy, and authors ’ relationship with computing later in life. The results suggest that first encounters with code must be accessible, error-tolerant and socially engaging, that mentorship can be a crucial factor in the acquisition of programming skills, and that cultivating positive selfefficacy in programming skills requires repeated positive exposure across the lifespan. These results raise several issues for novice programming languages and tools and suggest a number of new approaches to computing education. 1.

Historically, Harvey Mudd College (HMC) has had very little success attracting women to the study of computer science: women have chosen CS less than any other field of study. In 2006 HMC began three practices in order to increase the number of women studying and majoring in CS; these practices have now been in place for 3 years. With this paper we describe these practices and present a thorough evaluation of the quantitative and qualitative differences that have accompanied them. In sum, these efforts have rebalanced our department by significantly increasing women’s participation in our computer science program.

Abstract — Educational games have been around for some time, but there are still many areas that need to be explored. One of the main challenges when developing educational games is that the highest educational value is gained from games developed for one specific subject. Such games are very expensive to develop and they cannot be reused in others subjects. In this paper, we suggest to utilize collaborative gameplay to improve the learning capabilities of educational games for more than one subject. More specific, we search for the answer to the following three research questions: which properties characterize a good educational game; how can collaboration improve learning in educational games; and how to classify educational games that also can take the multiplayer aspect into account? The results presented are based on analysis of previous research on educational games as well as our own experiences from developing a multiplayer educational game. The contribution of this paper is a characterization of what makes good educational games, a theoretical model for how collaboration can improve learning in games, and the Lecture Games taxonomy of educational games.

We present a field study of TellTable, a new storytelling system designed to support creativity and collaboration amongst children. The application was deployed on a multitouch interactive table in the library of a primary school, where children could use it to create characters and scenery based on elements of the physical world (captured through photography) as well as through drawing. These could then be used to record a story which could be played back. TellTable allowed children to collaborate in devising stories that mixed the physical and the digital in creative ways and that could include themselves as characters. Additionally, the field deployment illustrated how children took inspiration from one another‟s stories, how they planned elements of their own tales before using the technology, and how the fact that stories could be accessed in the library led some to become well-known and popular within the school community. The real story here, we argue, needs to take into account all that happens within the wider context of use of this system. Author Keywords Storytelling, interactive tabletop, children, creativity,