Designing an interactive laboratory experiment to investigate buoyancy

Laboratory classes provide a visual and practical way of supplementing traditional teaching through lectures and tutorial classes. A criticism of laboratories in our School is that they are largely based on demonstration with insufficient participation by students. This provided the motivation to create a new laboratory experiment which would be interactive, encourage student enthusiasm with the subject and improve the quality of student learning.

The topic of the laboratory is buoyancy. While this is a key topic in the first-year fluids module, the laboratory has been designed in such a way that prior knowledge of the topic is unnecessary and therefore it would be accessible by secondary school pupils. The laboratory climaxes in a design challenge. However, it begins with a simple task involving students identifying some theoretical background information using given websites. They then have to apply their knowledge by developing some equations. Next, given some materials (a sheet of tinfoil, card and blu-tack), they have to design a vessel to carry the greatest mass without sinking. Thus, they are given an open-ended problem and have to provide a mathematical justification for their design. Students are expected to declare the maximum mass for their boat in advance of it being tested to create a sense of competition and fun. Overall, the laboratory involves tasks which begin at a low level and progressively get harder, incorporating understanding, applying, evaluating and designing (with reference to Bloom’s taxonomy).

The experiment has been tested in a modern laboratory with wall-mounted screens and access to the internet. Students enjoyed the hands-on aspect and thought the format helped their learning.

The use of cheap materials which are readily available means that many students can be involved at one time. Support documentation has been produced, both for the student participants and the facilitator. The latter is given advice on how to guide the students (without simply giving them the answer) and given some warning about potential problems the students might have.

The authors believe that the laboratory can be adapted for use by secondary school pupils and hope that it will be used to promote engineering in an engaging and enthusing way to a wider audience. To this end, contact has already been made with the Widening Participation Unit at the University to gain advice on possible next steps.

Design and Implementation of a Low Cost Virtual Rugby Decision Making Interactive

The paper describes the design and implementation of a novel low cost virtual rugby decision making interactive for use in a visitor centre. Original laboratory-based experimental work in decision making in rugby, using a virtual reality headset [1] is adapted for use in a public visitor centre, with consideration given to usability, costs, practicality and health and safety. Movement of professional rugby players was captured and animated within a virtually recreated stadium. Users then interact with these virtual representations via use of a lowcost sensor (Microsoft Kinect) to attempt to block them. Retaining the principles of perception and action, egocentric viewpoint, immersion, sense of presence, representative design and game design the system delivers an engaging and effective interactive to illustrate the underlying scientific principles of deceptive movement. User testing highlighted the need for usability, system robustness, fair and accurate scoring, appropriate level of difficulty and enjoyment.

Multimodal attention system for an interactive robot

[EN]Social robots are receiving much interest in the robotics community. The most important goal for such robots lies in their interaction capabilities. An attention system is crucial, both as a filter to center the robot’s perceptual resources and as a mean of letting the observer know that the robot has intentionality. In this paper a simple but flexible and functional attentional model is described. The model, which has been implemented in an interactive robot currently under development, fuses both visual and auditive information extracted from the robot’s environment, and can incorporate knowledge-based influences on attention.

Handmade Education : Interactive Food for Children`s Learning

Back to the early age of human history, Human thought of food as any substance that provides nutrition for the body. Man needed to hunt animals for food. Nowadays, Food is consumed not just to stop hunger of the body, but it also feeds the souls. Food has already been used for many other objectives apart from eating such as for artistic creations and creative marketing campaigns. Likewise, this research will also show a new perspective of food – Food as an educational material for children.

Interactive visual analysis of population study data

Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Fakultät für Informatik, Dissertation, 2015

Evolution of an Interactive Online Magazine for Students, Academics and Expert Practitioners to Engage Students in ESD

Urgency to embed awareness of sustainability principles and practice across society, and need for digital literacy and advocacy for sustainability are reshaping ESD. These, together with developments in learning and teaching, demand new tools to support implementation of project-based learning and more interactive approaches. This investigation explores the evolution of susthingsout.com, an online magazine for students, academics and expert practitioners, developed by the University of Worcester. This comprises two parts; the first, a private site specifically for students involved in sustainability learning on-campus; the second, an open-access site developed to deliver sustainability information and good practice across campus, community and not-for-profit and commercial organisations. This paper involves only the private site i.e. the equivalent of an in-house VLE specifically designed to support the teaching of sustainability to multi-disciplinary first and second year undergraduate students. It reports on the progress of the VLE, following three years of use and initial improvements, in terms of the student support and engagement, as well as considering the practical issues affecting these. The results fall into four categories of pedagogical, operational, cultural and external factors, which are synthesised to capture and share emerging knowledge of good practice offering insights to other developers of online sustainability materials.

Co-creation and co-destruction: : A practice-theory based study of interactive value formation

Drawing on an empirical study of public transport, this paper studies interactive value formation at the provider—customer interface, from a practice—theory perspective. In contrast to the bulk of previous research, it argues that interactive value formation is not only associated with value co-creation but also with value co-destruction. In addition, the paper also identifies five interaction value practices — informing, greeting, delivering, charging, and helping — and theorizes how interactive value formation takes place as well as how value is intersubjectively assessed by actors at the provider—customer interface. Furthermore, the paper also distinguishes between four types of interactive value formation praxis corresponding with four subject positions which practitioners step into when engaging in interactive value formation.

EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF TEACHER PRACTICE ON STUDENT LEARNING IN INTERACTIVE RADIO INSTRUCTION (IRI) CLASSROOMS: LESSONS FROM NEW DELHI AND RAJASTHAN (INDIA)

This quantitative study examines the impact of teacher practices on student achievement in classrooms where the English is Fun Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) programs were being used. A contemporary IRI design using a dual-audience approach, the English is Fun IRI programs delivered daily English language instruction to students in grades 1 and 2 in Delhi and Rajasthan through 120 30-minute programs via broadcast radio (the first audience) while modeling pedagogical techniques and behaviors for their teachers (the second audience). Few studies have examined how the dual-audience approach influences student learning. Using existing data from 32 teachers and 696 students, this study utilizes a multivariate multilevel model to examine the role of the primary expectations for teachers (e.g., setting up the IRI classroom, following instructions from the radio characters and ensuring students are participating) and the role of secondary expectations for teachers (e.g., modeling pedagogies and facilitating learning beyond the instructions) in promoting students’ learning in English listening skills, knowledge of vocabulary and use of sentences. The study finds that teacher practice on both sets of expectations mattered, but that practice in the secondary expectations mattered more. As expected, students made the smallest gains in the most difficult linguistic task (sentence use). The extent to which teachers satisfied the primary and secondary expectations was associated with gains in all three skills – confirming the relationship between students’ English proficiency and teacher practice in a dual-audience program. When it came to gains in students’ scores in sentence use, a teacher whose focus was greater on primary expectations had a negative effect on student performance in both states. In all, teacher practice clearly mattered but not in the same way for all three skills. An optimal scenario for teacher practice is presented in which gains in all three skills are maximized. These findings have important implications for the way the classroom teacher is cast in IRI programs that utilize a dual-audience approach and in the way IRI programs are contracted insofar as the role of the teacher in instruction is minimized and access is limited to instructional support from the IRI lessons alone.

InfoScout: An interactive, entity centric, person search tool.

Individuals living in highly networked societies publish a large amount of personal, and potentially sensitive, information online. Web investigators can exploit such information for a variety of purposes, such as in background vetting and fraud detection. However, such investigations require a large number of expensive man hours and human effort. This paper describes InfoScout, a search tool which is intended to reduce the time it takes to identify and gather subject centric information on the Web. InfoScout collects relevance feedback information from the investigator in order to rerank search results, allowing the intended information to be discovered more quickly. Users may still direct their search as they see fit, issuing ad-hoc queries and filtering existing results by keywords. Design choices are informed by prior work and industry collaboration.

An Adaptive and Hybrid Approach to Revisiting the Visibility Pipeline

We revisit the visibility problem, which is traditionally known in Computer Graphics and Vision fields as the process of computing a (potentially) visible set of primitives in the computational model of a scene. We propose a hybrid solution that uses a dry structure (in the sense of data reduction), a triangulation of the type , to accelerate the task of searching for visible primitives. We came up with a solution that is useful for real-time, on-line, interactive applications as 3D visualization. In such applications the main goal is to load the minimum amount of primitives from the scene during the rendering stage, as possible. For this purpose, our algorithm executes the culling by using a hybrid paradigm based on viewing-frustum, back-face culling and occlusion models. Results have shown substantial improvement over these traditional approaches if applied separately. This novel approach can be used in devices with no dedicated processors or with low processing power, as cell phones or embedded displays, or to visualize data through the Internet, as in virtual museums applications.

INTERACTIVE AND IMMERSIVE: Factual transmedia narratives around experiences of displacement and migration.

This article will examine how media organisations are increasingly experimenting and innovating with interactive transmedia forms to explore issues around displacement and the ongoing migration crisis. I plan to interview a number of key industry figures with a view to understand how and why journalists and producers are expanding the scope of factual storytelling beyond traditional media platforms. It will include a number of industry case studies.

Interaction techniques with novel multimodal feedback for addressing gesture-sensing systems

Users need to be able to address in-air gesture systems, which means finding where to perform gestures and how to direct them towards the intended system. This is necessary for input to be sensed correctly and without unintentionally affecting other systems. This thesis investigates novel interaction techniques which allow users to address gesture systems properly, helping them find where and how to gesture. It also investigates audio, tactile and interactive light displays for multimodal gesture feedback; these can be used by gesture systems with limited output capabilities (like mobile phones and small household controls), allowing the interaction techniques to be used by a variety of device types. It investigates tactile and interactive light displays in greater detail, as these are not as well understood as audio displays. Experiments 1 and 2 explored tactile feedback for gesture systems, comparing an ultrasound haptic display to wearable tactile displays at different body locations and investigating feedback designs. These experiments found that tactile feedback improves the user experience of gesturing by reassuring users that their movements are being sensed. Experiment 3 investigated interactive light displays for gesture systems, finding this novel display type effective for giving feedback and presenting information. It also found that interactive light feedback is enhanced by audio and tactile feedback. These feedback modalities were then used alongside audio feedback in two interaction techniques for addressing gesture systems: sensor strength feedback and rhythmic gestures. Sensor strength feedback is multimodal feedback that tells users how well they can be sensed, encouraging them to find where to gesture through active exploration. Experiment 4 found that they can do this with 51mm accuracy, with combinations of audio and interactive light feedback leading to the best performance. Rhythmic gestures are continuously repeated gesture movements which can be used to direct input. Experiment 5 investigated the usability of this technique, finding that users can match rhythmic gestures well and with ease. Finally, these interaction techniques were combined, resulting in a new single interaction for addressing gesture systems. Using this interaction, users could direct their input with rhythmic gestures while using the sensor strength feedback to find a good location for addressing the system. Experiment 6 studied the effectiveness and usability of this technique, as well as the design space for combining the two types of feedback. It found that this interaction was successful, with users matching 99.9% of rhythmic gestures, with 80mm accuracy from target points. The findings show that gesture systems could successfully use this interaction technique to allow users to address them. Novel design recommendations for using rhythmic gestures and sensor strength feedback were created, informed by the experiment findings.

The Descent of Pluto: Interactive dynamics, specialisation and reciprocity of roles in a Wikipedia debate

International audience

Supporting collocated and at-a-distance experiences with TV and VR displays

Televisions (TVs) and VR Head-Mounted Displays (VR HMDs) are used in shared and social spaces in the home. This thesis posits that these displays do not sufficiently reflect the collocated, social contexts in which they reside, nor do they sufficiently support shared experiences at-a-distance. This thesis explores how the role of TVs and VR HMDs can go beyond presenting a single entertainment experience, instead supporting social and shared use in both collocated and at-a-distance contexts. For collocated TV, this thesis demonstrates that the TV can be augmented to facilitate multi-user interaction, support shared and independent activities and multi-user use through multi-view display technology, and provide awareness of the multi-screen activity of those in the room, allowing the TV to reflect the social context in which it resides. For at-a-distance TV, existing smart TVs are shown to be capable of supporting synchronous at-a-distance activity, broadening the scope of media consumption beyond the four walls of the home. For VR HMDs, collocated proximate persons can be seamlessly brought into mixed reality VR experiences based on engagement, improving VR HMD usability. Applied to at-a-distance interactions, these shared mixed reality VR experiences can enable more immersive social experiences that approximate viewing together as if in person, compared to at-a-distance TV. Through an examination of TVs and VR HMDs, this thesis demonstrates that consumer display technology can better support users to interact, and share experiences and activities, with those they are close to.