Papers by Sharon Lynn Chu
Interaction Design and Children
Supporting children's writing activities is a primary concern in elementary-school grades. Using ... more Supporting children's writing activities is a primary concern in elementary-school grades. Using embodied means such as visual stimuli through pictures or motion pictures has been shown effective in supporting children's writing. To guide children during the writing activity, contextual cues are usually provided in face-to-face classroom practice with interactive instruction from a teacher. This paper explores the design of an interactive online system for videoscaffolded writing with contextual cues. In our online study with 13 children, we explored two approaches to designing contextual cues: temporally situated and visually situated. Participants were divided into two groups, each using a web-based interface to watch an animated video and write the story guided by one of the cue designs. We analyzed the children's writing process and outcome in both groups. Our results show that temporally situated cues support a stronger overall story structure, while visually situated cues support more descriptive and interpretive writing. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in interaction design; Empirical studies in HCI.
Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society, 2020
Access to technology education is a challenge for broadening participation in STEM for remote rur... more Access to technology education is a challenge for broadening participation in STEM for remote rural communities that make up 20% of US public schools. Teleconferencing technology has provided some level of access to STEM teaching expertise to these underrepresented populations. Unfortunately, many challenges remain to provide quality technology instruction in remote scenarios. This paper presents, first, a pilot study that uncovered the problems faced in using videoconferencing technology for physically-predicated technical learning. Second, the paper describes a lab-based study investigating the use of telepresence robotics to better support students' hands-on technology learning. Two conditions embodying different types of instructor representations were compared: co-present instructor and instructor through a telepresence-robot. Results characterize key differences in students' experience and learning outcomes across the two conditions. We conclude by drawing implications for the designs of telepresence robotics to support hands-on STEM learning in remote scenarios. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → User studies.
A good amount of research has explored the use of wearables for educational or learning purposes.... more A good amount of research has explored the use of wearables for educational or learning purposes. We have now reached a point when much literature can be found on that topic, but few attempts have been made to make sense of that literature from a holistic perspective. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on wearables for learning. Literature was sourced from conferences and journals pertaining to technology and education, and through an ad hoc search. Our review focuses on identifying the ways that wearables have been used to support learning and provides perspectives on that issue from a historical dimension, and with regards to the types of wearables used, the populations targeted, and the settings addressed. Seven different ways of how wearables have been used to support learning were identified. We propose a framework identifying five main components that have been addressed in existing research on how wearables can support learning and present our interpretations of unaddressed research directions based on our review results.
The multiplicity of computing and display devices currently available presents new opportunities ... more The multiplicity of computing and display devices currently available presents new opportunities for how visual analytics is performed. One of the significant inherent challenges that comes with the use of multiple and varied types of displays for visual analytics is the sharing and subsequent integration of information among different devices. Multiple devices enable analysts to employ and extend visual space for working with visualizations, but this requires users to switch intermittently between activi-ties and foci of interest over different workspaces. We present a visual analytics system, VisPorter, developed for use in a multiple display and device environment, and a user study that explores the usage and benefits of this system. VisPorter enables seamless cross-device activity through lightweight touch interactions, and allows multiple displays and devices to be fluidly connected for sensemaking.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
Face-to-face mentoring is facilitated through powerful embodied cues and resources (e.g., white b... more Face-to-face mentoring is facilitated through powerful embodied cues and resources (e.g., white boards, impromptu demonstrations, illustrative diagrams. • Means of Analyzing of Facilitated Communication: Multi-modal communication theory furnishes lenses by which we may analyze the mentoring communication facilitated by the technology to determine if and how the technology supports effective distance mentoring. Figure 1: In this pilot research, the college students at Texas A&M University met daily with the students at a far-rural high school at the Texas-Mexico border via video teleconference to provide instruction, mentorship, and guidance, hence engaging in a kind of distance apprenticeship where the college engineering students serve as 'More Knowledgeable Others' (MKOs) both in the role of instructors [15] and more knowledgeable peers [28].
Proceedings of FabLearn 2019
With the increasing interest of integrating Making into formal settings, like public school class... more With the increasing interest of integrating Making into formal settings, like public school classrooms, questions have emerged on how to sustain Making as a practice in these environments. Mentors, who can guide students' development of Making knowledge and skills, are needed in these classrooms to facilitate Making activities. In rural areas, the need for experienced mentors is often exacerbated by distance of experienced Maker-mentors from the classroom. In this research we studied how distance mentoring can help a group of high-school students in a rural school to Make and manufacture learning materials for an elementary school in their community. Grounded in literature from Lave and Wenger's communities of practice and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, the work presented in this paper investigates how mentorship develops in this classroom, becoming less dependent on researchers for guidance and thus becoming more self-sustaining. We discuss how distance-mentors can better train and sustain expertise in Making classrooms, and how our approach may support this mentorship process by aiming mentors and mentees towards a communal goal.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 2019
Our work is concerned with how embodied communication involving speech and gestures may be mediat... more Our work is concerned with how embodied communication involving speech and gestures may be mediated through mobile tele-robotics and augmented reality to support hands-on distance mentoring. Following work in the psycholinguistics of embodied communication (e.g., meaning is expressed through gesture, gaze, and speech), a four design-implement-test-deploy-evaluate study was undertaken. We investigated whether and how powerful multimodal language to support explanation and mentoring may be mediated over distance through the designs.
With the increasing interest of integrating Making into formal settings, like public school class... more With the increasing interest of integrating Making into formal settings, like public school classrooms, questions have emerged on how to sustain Making as a practice in these environments. Mentors, who can guide students' development of Making knowledge and skills, are needed in these classrooms to facilitate Making activities. In rural areas, the need for experienced mentors is often exacerbated by distance of experienced Maker-mentors from the classroom. In this research we studied how distance mentoring can help a group of high-school students in a rural school to Make and manufacture learning materials for an elementary school in their community. Grounded in literature from Lave and Wenger's communities of practice and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, the work presented in this paper investigates how mentorship develops in this classroom, becoming less dependent on researchers for guidance and thus becoming more self-sustaining. We discuss how distance-mentor...
Proceedings of FabLearn 2019
Little research addresses Making as an approach that may impact the relevance of science to stude... more Little research addresses Making as an approach that may impact the relevance of science to students. This paper investigates whether and how students make connections to their everyday life during curriculum-aligned Making activities. We argue that Making, with its focus on hands-on construction and technology, can act a possible bridge between 'school science', which tends to focus on formal models of science concepts, and 'everyday science', that addresses directly
Interactive Storytelling
We propose that emotional priming may be an effective approach to scaffold the creation of rich s... more We propose that emotional priming may be an effective approach to scaffold the creation of rich stories. There are relatively few emotion-based approaches to support users to create, instead of consume, rich stories. Emotional priming is the technique of using emotion-related stimuli to affect human’s executive control and affective processing. It has been researched mostly in terms of human’s behaviors and decision making. We conducted a within-subjects study with 12 participants to investigate the effects of emotional priming induced through an interactive application on storytelling quality. Two conditions of priming were compared to a baseline condition of no priming. In the first condition, the application primes participants by having asking them to perceive and recognize varying emotional stimuli (perception-based priming). In the second condition, the application primes participants by having them produce varying emotional facial expressions (production-based priming). Analyses show that emotional priming resulted in richer storytelling than no emotional priming, and that the production-based emotional priming condition resulted in statistically richer stories being told by participants. We discuss the possibility of integrating interactive emotional priming into storytelling applications.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
People use a significant amount of gestures when engaging in creative brainstorming. This is espe... more People use a significant amount of gestures when engaging in creative brainstorming. This is especially typical for creative workers who frequently convey ideas, designs, and stories to team members. These gestures produced during natural conversation contain information that is not necessarily conveyed through speech. This paper investigates the design of a system that uses people's gestures in natural communication contexts to produce external visualizations of their mental imagery, focusing on gestures that describe dimension-related information. While much psycholinguistics research address how gestures relate to the representations of concepts, little HCI work has explored the possibilities of harnessing gestures to support thinking. We conducted a study to explore how people gesture using a basic gesture-based visualization system in simulated creative gift design scenarios, towards the goal of deriving design implications. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from the study, allowing us to ascertain what features (e.g., users' spatial frames of reference and listener types) of a gesture-based visualization system need to be accounted for in design. Results showed that our system managed to visualize users' envisioned gift dimensions, but that visualized object area significantly affected users' perceived accuracy of the system. We extract themes as to what dimensions are important in the design of a gesture-based visualization system, and the possible uses of such a system from the participants' perspectives. We discuss implications for the design of gesture-based visualization systems to support creative work and possibilities for future directions of research.
Design, User Experience, and Usability. Practice and Case Studies
Digital fabrication (e.g. 3D printing) provides opportunities for people to act as a product desi... more Digital fabrication (e.g. 3D printing) provides opportunities for people to act as a product designer and create or adapt objects to their needs and preferences. While research has frequently studied the applications of 3D printing, little is understood on how people engage with the 3D-printed objects after production. This paper begins to fill in this gap by investigating how people perceive 3D-printed objects at two levels: first, basic material properties, and second, meaning or interpretation. A study was conducted with 22 participants comparing 3D-printed objects made of two materials (SLA resin and PLA) with mass-manufactured plastic objects. Qualitative and quantitative results revealed that people perceive material differences in texture, shine, and quality, and that they interpret 3D-printed and mass-manufactured objects differently. The study results can inform the design of 3D printing technology and software such that resultant objects are better aligned with users’ design intents and preferences.
International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction
ABSTRACT Movie recommender systems help users to navigate the magnitude and diversity of movies t... more ABSTRACT Movie recommender systems help users to navigate the magnitude and diversity of movies that people have easy access to nowadays, especially with online streaming services. However, current systems personalize recommendations primarily based on what they think a specific user would like or prefer using information about how similar the users are to other users. Prior work has suggested that this could lead to a ‘filter bubble’ whereby users only watch movies that they are comfortable with. This paper presents the novel concept of event-inspired movies that draw on users’ highly specific everyday life experiences to recommend movies that are meaningful to them. To conduct the study, we developed a systematic process to align movies with viewer variables. Meaningful movies have been said to have therapeutic potential to possibly affect one’s sense of overall well-being. We conducted a study with 24 participants to explore how users engage with event-inspired movies, whether event-inspired movies are perceived as more relevant, and their potential to affect users’ sense of life satisfaction. In so doing, we also contribute a process and insights on how to operationalize event-inspired movies that can inform the implementation of a movie recommender system situated within the proposed paradigm.
Proceedings of the Conference on Creativity and Making in Education
This paper proposes Micro-Manufacture (M2), a model of Making that extends its practice to includ... more This paper proposes Micro-Manufacture (M2), a model of Making that extends its practice to include aspects of engineering concerns of production and reproducibility. A longitudinal study was conducted with six high school students engaging in the M2 model within the scope of a two-year long Career and Technical Education class. We investigated the potential of M2 to convey educational benefits and to affect Making and Engineering self-concepts. Quantitative results showed that the students generally made positive gains in Making and Engineering self-efficacy, but that the real-world requirements of M2 caused Maker mindset perceptions to be more negative. Qualitative findings however showed that M2 requirements served to focus the students, and enabled them to develop skills that they may not have otherwise developed by simply engaging in conventional Making activities.
Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference on Creativity and Fabrication in Education, 2016
As Making moves from informal settings, such as museums and libraries to formal learning contexts... more As Making moves from informal settings, such as museums and libraries to formal learning contexts, such as the classroom, questions arise with regard to the sustainability of the practice of Making. Learning in the classroom is continuous over time, while the integration of Making currently tend to be necessarily insular and in snapshot interventions. The development of a Making community of practice among students in the classroom is important for classroom-based Making to be sustainable. Grounded in literature on Lave and Wenger's communities of practice and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, the work presented in this paper investigate the social aspects of Making in 5th grade science classes as indicators of the possible formation of a Making community of practice among the students. Our findings elicited different types of social roles that the students adopted, and various ways by which learning was socially mediated, and showed how help received and given varied according to student roles and over time. We discuss and conclude with the importance of pursuing further research into this topic area for Making into the classroom.
International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 2015
In this article, we present a new direction for the role of Making for children. Beyond the use o... more In this article, we present a new direction for the role of Making for children. Beyond the use of Making to teach specific STEM concepts as is common in prior work, we propose that Making activities should be designed with the focus of instilling a Maker mindset in children. Our target is elementary-school-level children aged 8 to 11. We present an approach that conceptualizes Making as a 'Means-to-an-Ends' to nurture a Maker mindset and identity in children. The approach was embodied in a carefully-designed storytelling Making kit called the Maker Theater, and two Maker workshops for children in the target age range. Our analysis goal in this article was to investigate how the potential for a Maker mindset/identity formation may be manifested in children's attitudes and behaviors. Guided by a theoretical framework of three key determinants of the Maker mindset (self-efficacy, motivation and interest), we analyzed workshop data using qualitative coding methods to derive thematic indicators. We discuss our contributions and the value of our findings for the child-computer interaction community.
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children - IDC '15, 2015
The purpose of this study is to explore the role of materiality in tangible interaction design fo... more The purpose of this study is to explore the role of materiality in tangible interaction design for young children. We specifically target children aged 4 to 6 years old because of societal trend of early exposure to touch screen devices for children. This study compares three types of material (felt, wood, and plastic) for tangibles along with touch-based interaction and how the differences implicate child art creation on an iPad application. Through mixed-methods analysis of twenty-six participants' experiences, we use data sources of video recordings, drawings, and interview. The main findings looked at the relationship in hardness between digital and physical tools as well as the differences of interactions when using finger-based and stylus pens for physical drawing tools. The findings from this study may be applied to design tangible user interfaces for young children. iii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my parents whose support and love cannot be measured.
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2015
At around age nine when social awareness and self-evaluation heighten, children experience a prec... more At around age nine when social awareness and self-evaluation heighten, children experience a precipitous slump in creative engagement. We propose an enactment-based approach grounded in embodied cognition theories to support children's creative self-efficacy and creative thinking in storytelling during the period of this slump. Our investigation of the approach with 20 children indicated that enactment-based animated authoring improves children's sense of self-efficacy in creating stories, particularly for children with low to medium extraversion, and enables children to produce richer stories, especially for children who scored low on the baseline creativity test.
At around age nine when social awareness and self-evaluation heighten, children experience a prec... more At around age nine when social awareness and self-evaluation heighten, children experience a precipitous slump in creative engagement. We propose an enactment-based approach grounded in embodied cognition theories to support children's creative self-efficacy and creative thinking in storytelling during the period of this slump. Our investigation of the approach with 20 children indicated that enactment-based animated authoring improves children's sense of self-efficacy in creating stories, particularly for children with low to medium extraversion, and enables children to produce richer stories, especially for children who scored low on the baseline creativity test.
Uploads
Papers by Sharon Lynn Chu