[1]
MiLa: An Audiovisual Instrument for Learning the Curwen Hand Signs
Late-Breaking Works: Extending User Capabilities
/
Hong, Matt H. Y.
/
Hicks, William S.
/
Horn, Michael S.
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.1691-1697
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: We present a novel musical system for learning the Curwen-Kodaly hand signs,
which stand for solfege syllables and pitches (do, re, mi, etc.). These hand
postures comprise a system of musical notation typically used in sight-singing
training to familiarize with patterns of musical tones. Therefore, what
concerns us is music literacy as opposed to practice with any particular
instrument. Our system uses a Leap motion sensor to recognize the hand signs
and produce corresponding user-recorded sounds. For each hand sign, the system
also displays a natural 3D scenery, which is intended to match the metaphorical
nature of the tone and has a resemblance to the hand posture (e.g. mi is a
steady or calm tone, so the hand sign is an open hand with palm downwards and
the scenery is a calm but moving ocean).
[2]
Invasion of the Energy Monsters: A Family Board Game about Energy
Consumption
Late-Breaking Works: Games & Playful Interaction
/
Banerjee, Amartya
/
Horn, Michael S.
/
Davis, Pryce
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.1828-1834
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: We present Invasion of the Energy Monsters, a board game that attempts to
highlight the role of family practices in household energy consumption. While
household energy management activities -- such as controlling heating and
cooling systems -- tend to be adult centric, we believe that children and
adolescents have a meaningful role to play in helping their families move
toward more sustainable ways of living. To that end, Energy Monsters has been
designed to scaffold interactions between family members and encourage
conversations about electricity consumption and waste. In this paper we provide
an overview of our current design and a brief summary of results from our
playtesting sessions with five families, and a description of versions that are
under development.
[3]
Peter the Fashionista?: Computer Programming Games and Gender Oriented
Cultural Forms
Learning
/
AlSulaiman, Sarah
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human
Interaction in Play
2015-10-05
p.185-195
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: We present a study of two games designed to help elementary and middle
school students learn computer programming concepts. The first game was
intended to be "gender neutral", aligning with might be described as a
consensus opinion on best practices for computational learning environments.
The second game, based on the cultural form of dress up dolls was deliberately
designed to appeal to girls. We recruited 70 participants in an international
two-phase study to investigate the relationship between games, gender,
attitudes towards computer programming, and learning. Our findings suggest that
while the two games were equally effective in terms of learning outcomes, there
were differences in motivation between players of the two games. Specifically,
participants who reported a preference for girl-oriented games were more
motivated to learn about computer programming when they played a game that they
perceived as designed for girls. In addition, we describe how the two games
seemed to encourage different types of social activity between players in a
classroom setting. Based on these results we reflect on the strategy of
exclusively designing games and activities as "gender neutral", and suggest
that deliberately employing cultural forms, including gendered ones, may help
create a more productive experience for learners.
[4]
Fishing with friends: using tabletop games to raise environmental awareness
in aquariums
/
D'Angelo, Sarah
/
Pollock, D. Harmon
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Horn, Michael
Proceedings of ACM IDC'15: Interaction Design and Children
2015-06-21
p.29-38
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: We present the design and evaluation of an exhibit on the consequences of
overfishing that we deployed at a local aquarium. The exhibit, Fishing with
Friends, is a multiplayer game in which visitors compete to earn money by
catching fish. As the game progresses, overzealous fishing results in damage to
a simulated ocean ecosystem. Our goal is to encourage visitors to reflect on
damage caused by overfishing and discuss strategies to preserve shared ocean
resources. Aquariums are leading the effort to inform the general public about
issues of marine sustainability. However, it is challenging to make these
complex topics engaging and accessible to a diverse audiences in real-world
settings. We conducted a study with 523 visitors at the aquarium to evaluate
our design. Results from a questionnaire suggest that engagement with Fishing
with Friends improved our target audience's awareness of environmental issues
compared to those who were not exposed to the game. Our results also highlight
challenges of using interactive tabletops displays in crowded and chaotic
exhibit halls. On average, 52.6 visitors interacted with the game every hour
that the exhibit was on display; this rapid flow limited engagement and
presented unique design challenges that we discuss in this paper. Future work
will be needed to assess longer term impacts and to compare game play to other
forms of interactive and non-interactive interventions.
[5]
"Let's dive into it!": Learning electricity with multiple representations
/
Beheshti, Elham
/
Obiorah, Mmachi
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of ACM IDC'15: Interaction Design and Children
2015-06-21
p.263-266
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: Electrical circuits are difficult to understand. In this paper, we introduce
Spark, a museum exhibit that enables learners to interact with multiple
representations of electrical circuits at the same time. The goal is to
familiarize children with fundamental concepts of electricity such as current
and resistance. We tested our design with 6 parent-child dyads at a major
science museum. Our study investigates how families make sense of
representations at the level of circuits and at the level of electrons and
ions. Our findings show a wide variety of visitor interactions with the
exhibit, in particular when connecting the two representations of a circuit.
[6]
Strawbies: explorations in tangible programming
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Hu, Felix
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Zekelman, Ariel
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Horn, Michael
/
Judd, Frances
Proceedings of ACM IDC'15: Interaction Design and Children
2015-06-21
p.410-413
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: In this demo we present Strawbies, a realtime tangible programming game
designed for children ages 5 to 10. Strawbies is played by constructing
physical programs out of wooden tiles in front of an iPad. This interaction is
made possible with the use of an Osmo play system that includes a mirror to
reflect images in front of the iPad through the front-facing camera. We
combined this system with the TopCodes computer vision library for fast and
reliable image recognition. Here we describe a set of principles that guided
our iterative design process along with an overview of testing sessions with
children that informed our most recent instantiation of Strawbies.
[7]
Fluid Grouping: Quantifying Group Engagement around Interactive Tabletop
Exhibits in the Wild
Collaborative Tables, Walls & Rooms
/
Block, Florian
/
Hammerman, James
/
Horn, Michael
/
Spiegel, Amy
/
Christiansen, Jonathan
/
Phillips, Brenda
/
Diamond, Judy
/
Evans, E. Margaret
/
Shen, Chia
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2015-04-18
v.1
p.867-876
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: Interactive surfaces are increasingly common in museums and other informal
learning environments where they are seen as a medium for promoting social
engagement. However, despite their increasing prevalence, we know very little
about factors that contribute to collaboration and learning around interactive
surfaces. In this paper we present analyses of visitor engagement around
several multi-touch tabletop science exhibits. Observations of 629 visitors
were collected through two widely used techniques: video study and shadowing.
We make four contributions: 1) we present an algorithm for identifying groups
within a dynamic flow of visitors through an exhibit hall; 2) we present
measures of group-level engagement along with methods for statistically
analyzing these measures; 3) we assess the effect of observational techniques
on visitors' engagement, demonstrating that consented video studies do not
necessarily reflect visitor behavior in more naturalistic circumstances; and 4)
we present an analysis showing that groups of two, groups with both children
and adults, and groups that take turns spend longer at the exhibits and engage
more with scientific concepts.
[8]
Energy diet: energy feedback on a bathroom scale
Energy & environment
/
Kuo, Pei-Yi
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of the 2014 International Joint Conference on Pervasive and
Ubiquitous Computing
2014-09-13
v.1
p.435-446
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: Energy Diet is a design concept for a digital bathroom scale that displays
personal health information in the form of body weight alongside environmental
health information in the form of carbon weight. We intentionally conflate
these two types of feedback in an effort to encourage people to regularly
monitor their energy use as they weigh themselves and to reflect on the complex
relationships between personal health and environmental health. To inform our
design we tested paper prototypes and administered two surveys with 500
participants. We then created a working prototype that we deployed in four
participants' homes for one month each. This paper discusses findings and
design implications from our surveys and in-home deployment. Overall, seeing
carbon weight together with body weight on a scale helped participants to
conceptualize energy consumption and to reflect on a range of daily activities
and their environmental impacts.
[9]
Interactive Assessment Tools for Computational Thinking in High School STEM
Classrooms
Regular Papers
/
Weintrop, David
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Beheshti, Elham
/
Horn, Michael S.
/
Orton, Kai
/
Trouille, Laura
/
Jona, Kemi
/
Wilensky, Uri
Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on INtelligent TEchnologies
for interactive enterTAINment
2014-07-09
p.22-25
Keywords: Computational Thinking; Assessment; STEM
© Copyright 2014 Springer International Publishing
Summary: This paper presents a pair of online, interactive assessments designed to
measures students' computational thinking skills. The assessments are part of a
larger project to bring computational thinking into high school STEM
classrooms. Each assessment includes interactive tools that highlight the power
of computation in the practice of scientific and mathematical inquiry. The
computational tools used in our assessments enable students to analyze data
with dynamic visualizations and explore concepts with computational models.
[10]
Waiting for learning: designing interactive education materials for patient
waiting areas
Applications for learning
/
Leong, Zeina Atrash
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of ACM IDC'14: Interaction Design and Children
2014-06-17
p.145-153
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: We describe the research and design of educational media for children in
doctor's office waiting areas. Even though technology use for medical purposes
has become increasingly prominent for doctors, administration, and patients,
research on the use of interactive technology for health education is limited.
In this project, we focus on clinics for Sickle Cell Disease treatment. These
clinics treat patients of various ages and disease severity, but all patients
make frequent, recurring visits for treatments and checkups. We describe our
current research to better understand the behaviors and activities of patients
as they wait in the clinic, their expectations and understandings of Sickle
Cell Disease and its treatment, the educational material currently available,
and our preliminary methods for developing interactive technologies for these
environments. This research includes observations in pediatric clinic waiting
areas, interviews with clinic staff, and preliminary user testing with our
interactive designs.
This paper details our observations of waiting areas in two sickle cell
clinics. We discuss our findings and their implications for design. We also
describe the design of an augmented reality tablet application that we placed
in the waiting area for user testing. We use this study to discuss further
design iterations and directions for future work.
[11]
Frog pond: a code-first learning environment on evolution and natural
selection
Thursday short papers
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Horn, Michael S.
/
Brady, Corey
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Hjorth, Arthur
/
Wagh, Aditi
/
Wilensky, Uri
Proceedings of ACM IDC'14: Interaction Design and Children
2014-06-17
p.357-360
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: Understanding processes of evolution and natural selection is both important
and challenging for learners. We describe a "code-first" learning environment
called Frog Pond designed to introduce natural selection to elementary and
middle school aged learners. Learners use NetTango, a blocks-based programming
interface to NetLogo, to control frogs inhabiting a lily pond. Simple programs
result in changes to the frog population over successive generations. Our
approach foregrounds computational thinking as a bridge to understanding
evolution as an emergent phenomenon.
[12]
Programming in the pond: a tabletop computer programming exhibit
Works-in-progress
/
Horn, Michael S.
/
Weintrop, David
/
Routman, Emily
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2014-04-26
v.2
p.1417-1422
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: We present the design of an interactive tabletop exhibit intended to engage
visitors in free-form computer programming activities at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View, California. We describe our design goals and outline
challenges associated with creating this interactive experience for a
free-choice learning environment. We review results of testing sessions with
users from our target audience across three successive prototypes.
[13]
Beyond video games for social change
Forums
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Horn, Michael S.
interactions
2014-03
v.21
n.2
p.66-68
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: The boundaries between 'the digital' and our everyday physical world are
dissolving as we develop more physical ways of interacting with computing. This
forum presents some of the topics discussed in the colorful multidisciplinary
field of tangible and embodied interaction. -- Eva Hornecker, Editor
[14]
Ultimate trainer: instructional feedback for ultimate frisbee players
Let's get physical
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Solomon, Cynthia
/
Banerjee, Amartya
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Tangible and Embedded
Interaction
2014-02-16
p.137-140
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: Ultimate frisbee is a rapidly growing sport that is played in more than 42
countries. Although it is often seen as a lighthearted pastime, significant
training and practice are necessary to achieve an average level of throwing
proficiency, and it is difficult for new players to map the flight of the
frisbee to their throwing action. In this paper, we present Ultimate Trainer, a
frisbee augmented with electronics that gives a player visual and haptic cues
based on grip strength and angle of release, along with flight information such
as rotation speed and time of flight. We give a brief account of our design and
implementation with results of preliminary testing.
[15]
Ghost hunter: parents and children playing together to learn about energy
consumption
Play and learn
/
Banerjee, Amartya
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Tangible and Embedded
Interaction
2014-02-16
p.267-274
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: We present the design and evaluation of Ghost Hunter, an interactive system
to engage parents and children in seeking out hidden sources of energy
consumption in their homes. Our system combines an electro-magnetic field (EMF)
detector with a mobile tablet computer. Bringing Ghost Hunter within range of
an electrical current activates the detector. Through the Ghost Hunter design
we attempted to evoke the cultural form of hide-and-seek as a way to help
children and parents structure their activity. We present our design and
implementation followed by a qualitative evaluation conducted with seven
families in their homes. Our findings describe how parents supported their
children's learning about energy consumption, and ways in which the activities
led to unexpected discoveries.
[16]
Translating Roberto to Omar: computational literacy, stickerbooks, and
cultural forms
Full Papers
/
Horn, Michael S.
/
AlSulaiman, Sarah
/
Koh, Jaime
Proceedings of ACM IDC'13: Interaction Design and Children
2013-06-24
p.120-127
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: We present the design and evaluation of an interactive storybook to support
emerging computational literacy skills for preschool and early elementary
school children. We structured our designs to take advantage of existing
language literacy practices between parents and children around the cultural
form of a children's storybook. We evaluated our design with 14 families from
two distinct cultural backgrounds: families from the United States Midwest and
families from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Our findings describe ways in which parents
support and structure children's programming activities, and how parental
involvement varied across the two groups.
[17]
Interaction design, books, and cultural forms
Workshop best position papers
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of ACM IDC'13: Interaction Design and Children
2013-06-24
p.628-631
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: What reasons do we have for continuing to incorporate traditional print
media into interaction designs for children? In this position statement, I
address this question from the perspective of cultural forms. My argument is
that in the creation of novel forms of interaction it is advantageous to
present strong and recognizable cultural forms to help parents and children
structure their activity around familiar artifacts. This, in turn, helps
activate valuable cognitive, physical, and emotional resources that parents and
children can bring to bear on the new task.
[18]
Circuit in pieces: understanding electricity from electrons to light bulbs
Learning
/
Beheshti, Elham
/
Fitzpatrick, Colin
/
Hope, Alexis
/
Piper, Anne Marie
/
Horn, Michael
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI'13 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2013-04-27
v.2
p.691-696
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: Electrical circuits are difficult to understand. Novices tend to have
incorrect understandings of what happens at the level of atoms and electrons in
a circuit, which leads to difficulty in understanding and predicting the
outcomes of various electrical circuits. We are designing an interactive
learning tool called Circuit in Pieces (CiP) that enables learners to interact
with representations of electrical circuits at both a micro and a macro level.
Using a research through design process that includes interviews and sessions
with six students, we explore different approaches for interacting in and
between levels. In this paper, we offer preliminary results and design
implications for supporting switching between macro and micro level views.
[19]
StallTalk: graffiti, toilets, and anonymous location based micro blogging
alt.chi: ethics
/
Friedman, Jonathan
/
Horn, Michael S.
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI'13 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2013-04-27
v.2
p.2179-2188
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: The ways in which we leave graffiti have not changed much in thousands of
years. Humans have felt the need to anonymously leave messages to one another
for centuries. In this paper, we introduce StallTalk (www.stalltalk.info), an
anonymous location-based micro blogging website that uses QR codes posted in
bathroom stalls. StallTalk allows users to leave digital graffiti on bathroom
walls without actually causing permanent damage. Users scan the QR codes, which
are unique to each stall, and write short messages to each other. We deployed
StallTalk in over 500 locations and have had almost 9,000 unique visitors to
our website.
[20]
The role of cultural forms in tangible interaction design
Cultural perspectives
/
Horn, Michael S.
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Tangible and Embedded
Interaction
2013-02-10
2013-02-10
p.117-124
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: I suggest an approach to tangible interaction design that builds on social
and cultural foundations. Specifically, I propose that designers can evoke
cultural forms as a means to tap into users' existing cognitive, physical, and
emotional resources. The emphasis is less on improving the usability of an
interface and more on improving the overall experience around an interactive
artifact by cueing productive patterns of social activity. My use of the term
cultural form is derived from the work of Geoffrey Saxe and his form-function
shift framework. This framework describes a process through which individuals
appropriate cultural forms and restructure them to serve new functions in light
of shifting goals and expectations. I describe Saxe's framework and then
illustrate the use of cultural forms in design with three examples.
[21]
Touch, click, navigate: comparing tabletop and desktop interaction for map
navigation tasks
Understanding users
/
Beheshti, Elham
/
Van Devender, Anne
/
Horn, Michael
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Interactive
Tabletops and Surfaces
2012-11-11
p.205-213
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: Multi-touch tabletops and desktop computers offer different affordances for
interaction with digital maps. Previous research suggests that these
differences may affect how a person navigates in the world. To test this idea
we randomly assigned 22 participants to one of two conditions. Participants
used the interfaces to complete a series of tasks in which they interacted with
a digital map of a fictitious city and then attempted to navigate through a
corresponding virtual world. However, based on participant performance, we find
no evidence that interface type affects navigation ability. We discuss map
navigation strategies across the two conditions and analyze multi-touch
gestures used by participants in the tabletop condition. Finally, based on
these analyses, we consider implications for the design of interactive map
interfaces.
[22]
FloTree: a multi-touch interactive simulation of evolutionary processes
Demo session
/
Chua, Kien Chuan
/
Qin, Yongqiang
/
Block, Florian
/
Phillips, Brenda
/
Diamond, Judy
/
Evans, E. Margaret
/
Horn, Michael S.
/
Shen, Chia
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Interactive
Tabletops and Surfaces
2012-11-11
p.299-302
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: We present FloTree, a multi-user simulation that illustrates key dynamic
processes underlying evolutionary change. Our intention is to create a informal
learning environment that links micro-level evolutionary processes to
macro-level outcomes of speciation and biodiversity. On a multi-touch table,
the simulation represents change from generation to generation in a population
of organisms. By placing hands or arms on the surface, visitors can add
environmental barriers, thus interrupting the genetic flow between the
separated populations. This results in sub-populations that accumulate genetic
differences independently over time, sometimes leading to the formation of new
species. Learners can morph the result of the simulation into a corresponding
phylogenetic tree. The free-form hand and body touch gestures invite creative
input from users, encourages social interaction, and provides an opportunity
for deep engagement.
[23]
FlowBlocks: a multi-touch ui for crowd interaction
Multi-touch
/
Block, Florian
/
Wigdor, Daniel
/
Phillips, Brenda Caldwell
/
Horn, Michael S.
/
Shen, Chia
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology
2012-10-07
v.1
p.497-508
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: Multi-touch technology lends itself to collaborative crowd interaction (CI).
However, common tap-operated widgets are impractical for CI, since they are
susceptible to accidental touches and interference from other users. We present
a novel multi-touch interface called FlowBlocks in which every UI action is
invoked through a small sequence of user actions: dragging parametric
UI-Blocks, and dropping them over operational UI-Docks. The FlowBlocks approach
is advantageous for CI because it a) makes accidental touches inconsequential;
and b) introduces design parameters for mutual awareness, concurrent input, and
conflict management. FlowBlocks was successfully used on the floor of a busy
natural history museum. We present the complete design space and describe a
year-long iterative design and evaluation process which employed the Rapid
Iterative Test and Evaluation (RITE) method in a museum setting.
[24]
Omnipedia: bridging the wikipedia language gap
It's a big web!
/
Bao, Patti
/
Hecht, Brent
/
Carton, Samuel
/
Quaderi, Mahmood
/
Horn, Michael
/
Gergle, Darren
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2012 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2012-05-05
v.1
p.1075-1084
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: We present Omnipedia, a system that allows Wikipedia readers to gain insight
from up to 25 language editions of Wikipedia simultaneously. Omnipedia
highlights the similarities and differences that exist among Wikipedia language
editions, and makes salient information that is unique to each language as well
as that which is shared more widely. We detail solutions to numerous front-end
and algorithmic challenges inherent to providing users with a multilingual
Wikipedia experience. These include visualizing content in a language-neutral
way and aligning data in the face of diverse information organization
strategies. We present a study of Omnipedia that characterizes how people
interact with information using a multilingual lens. We found that users
actively sought information exclusive to unfamiliar language editions and
strategically compared how language editions defined concepts. Finally, we
briefly discuss how Omnipedia generalizes to other domains facing language
barriers.
[25]
Of BATs and APEs: an interactive tabletop game for natural history museums
Teaching with games
/
Horn, Michael
/
Leong, Zeina Atrash
/
Block, Florian
/
Diamond, Judy
/
Evans, E. Margaret
/
Phillips, Brenda
/
Shen, Chia
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2012 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2012-05-05
v.1
p.2059-2068
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: In this paper we describe visitor interaction with an interactive tabletop
exhibit on evolution that we designed for use in natural history museums. We
video recorded 30 families using the exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural
History. We also observed an additional 50 social groups interacting with the
exhibit without video recording. The goal of this research is to explore ways
to develop "successful" interactive tabletop exhibits for museums. To determine
criteria for success in this context, we borrow the concept of Active Prolonged
Engagement (APE) from the science museum literature. Research on APE sets a
high standard for visitor engagement and learning, and it offers a number of
useful concepts and measures for research on interactive surfaces in the wild.
In this paper we adapt and expand on these measures and apply them to our
tabletop exhibit. Our results show that visitor groups collaborated effectively
and engaged in focused, on-topic discussion for prolonged periods of time. To
understand these results, we analyze visitor conversation at the exhibit. Our
analysis suggests that social practices of game play contributed substantially
to visitor collaboration and engagement with the exhibit.
