Summary + Review: User-centred design for a mobile learning application

I've been gearing up for dissertation research by reading just about everything on every related sub-topic. This week's theme was mobile learning. It appears to me that this was an emphasis at the Mexican Workshop on Human Computer Interaction last year, because many of the papers I found came out of that publication. I'll be discussing Wood and Romero's work on the design of an application to teach kinematics to high school physics students.

Summary: The paper describes the user-centered design process that they used to build and evaluate the GUI for a mobile program. Wood and Romero situate themselves very much on the user interface side for this paper, not evaluating learning gains at this stage. No additional papers have been published in an ACM venue, so I'm not sure if they have moved forward to evaluating learning gains at this time. The focus here is on the design process.

The first user study involved math educators who teach the use of kinematic graphs to high school students. A set of interviews were conducted in order to determine areas where software could best support students and discover common misconceptions in order to include scaffolding to support the correct understandings.

The next user study used a paper prototype presented to educational technology researchers. The focus was to determine the shape of the application. Following that, learners were involved to evaluate the interface that resulted from the first paper prototype session. This paper development occurred in two iterations, each with four or five student participants.

Those findings then were applied in a hi-fi prototype, also performed in two iterations. The results of these findings are described in a non-numeric function, as essentially, that the users found it easy to use the application in its final iteration. One of the contributions this paper claims is that different stages of prototyping may need fewer or more iterations. For example, they included zero mid-fi iterations because they deemed it inappropriate.

Review: The authors suggest an idea early on that they don't confront in their paper, namely, that building an application for iPhone plays on the popularity of the device with the target age group. This question could have been addressed in the prototyping sessions, but was not.

Another assertion made early on by the teachers they interviewed was the importance of competition and collaboration to keep interest. They acknowledge this, and discuss the functions of the application that allow for collaboration, but don't really talk about the affordances that might be provided by their application.

Wood S, Romero P. User-centred design for a mobile learning application. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Mexican Workshop on Human Computer Interaction.Vol 1. Universidad Politécnica de San Luis Potosʼ\i; 2010:77–84. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1978719 [Accessed July 18, 2011].

CHI 2011: Super Short Wrap Up

I'll hopefully continue to document my CHI remarks as time permits, but we'll start with a short wrap up.

I attended a lot of sessions just because they sounded interesting. The first one was about programs that use humor to interact with humans, and the difficulty of applying humor through text alone. Also on Monday, I attended a session on HCI for Peace that I should get around to deconstructing sooner rather than later. Tuesday, I hung out in alt.chi for a lot of the day and listened to an epic discussion about social computing systems research. Tuesday was one of the hardest days for me as far as choosing which panels to attend, because there was so much that sounded fantastic.

Wednesday and Thursday were the days that I filled with gaming panels, technical presentations, and even a SIG session. These were the most beneficial in terms of framing of my own work, though some of the conversations had were peculiar, from my point of interest.

Now, the next step is somehow determining how to maintain the connections I made at the event. I met many, many, many students, practitioners, postdocs, professors...and now I've got to get beyond, "Hi, I was the girl you met at chi with the blue hair!" level of knowledge. It was a wonderful conference, and I hope to continue attending for many years.

Let me explain...no, we have no time. Let me sum up.

The title of this post is paraphrased from The Princess Bride.

This last semester was rough. Not too long after my last post, the CHI submission deadline past. I'm writing this post from my hostel room in Vancouver, so that should tell you what happened with that submission. (It was accepted.) I went through the appeals process, and was told that I would have to both retake my qualifying exam AND take an automata class. Only a week or so after that, I lost one of my best friends to a sudden illness.

I flew back home to California for her funeral. It was unbelievably hard. Jessica was the first person that I lost since I was a very small child, and it still doesn't make any sense. I was back in classes not too long after that, struggling to be functional. I sat my qualifying exams for the third time in late March, not at my best by far.

Throughout this, I've been continuing work on the EcoCollage project, setting up my new website, working on a group project in my HCI course that went haywire during the data collection because it's very difficult to get eye-tracking to work well when you've never used that hardware before. We ended up performing the entire experiment for a second time, three weeks from the due date, and pushing through the analysis on time. My most sincere regret is that we weren't able to submit an IRB application in time, so /this/ set of data can not be submitted to CHI, despite the lack of personal identifiers.

In late April I was informed that once again, I received conditional passes. I pretty much resigned myself to finding a job. My adviser? Not so much. My adviser pushed hard on the committee, emphasizing both the publications I have and the work I've done and the person I am, until they said, "fine" and requested that I take the algorithms class at UIC. This is a good thing, as I am certainly not sufficiently algo'd up. I'll be taking the class with a professor I find fascinating, who is tough but fair, which I need. This is lesson number one of graduate school: your adviser is your one and only advocate. Their interest in you can save your career.

So at this moment, I'm in a pretty good mood. Again, I'm going to make a steady attempt to push hard on actually using this blog. The next few posts will be advice about attending a conference on the magnitude of CHI, and some tips that I learned. Since I'm unfortunately too aware of how few people read this, I'm going to put blog-writing in my calendar as a weekly(?) activity, until I grow accustomed to it.

Terrible Blogger, Me.

I'm a terrible blogger. I really am. Consistency is something that I'm going to work on. So until I get bored/distracted again, I'm going to try a bit more firmly to summarize/review a paper each week day that I don't have school. Starting Monday, because that's when school starts. 3 days a week. Papers! About ubiquitous gaming. And epistemic gaming. And whatever I end up reading for class on the side! So. Look forward to that!

Brought to you by the procrastinating on my work-in-progress poster submission for CHI.

Haar Classifier Training Program

If you haven't used Processing to power through some small application that you need, I highly recommend it. (I just now remembered I still haven't posted about my poster in the conference, and given that it's officially published, I can officially talk about at least the extent to what we've done so far. Next post will be on that.) In any case, as part of the research, we're now switching to an OpenCV implementation, which means training a Haar Classifier. Now this is a task that is...a pain. It involves ideally thousands of images, and if you want the best accuracy, you should hand-annotate where your object is in the images.

To avoid going crazy and needing to destroy everything in the lab, I wrote a short app in processing to create the Haar file. I'll probably post a link to the code after I've completed the training on our images and verified that it doesn't start eating memory like no-one's business for large samples, since I had tried so very hard to avoid writing this app myself. Still, using Processing, it took all of 30 minutes to produce something that will be useful. I could've spent more time with the interface, and if I decide to release it, I very well may modify the code to have a nicer I/F and support multiple occurrences in the same image, but for now, this little app is sufficient for my purposes.

For the record, there's something utterly satisfying about completing a program in under an hour. :)

UbiComp 2010: Paper of MY Conference

So while this paper was not nominated for best paper, and should not have been, it did quite a bit for me personally in terms of considering structure for my own future thesis.

Andrea Grimes, Vasudhara Kantroo and Rebecca E. Grinter (2010). Let's Play! Mobile Health Games for Adults. Proc. of UBICOMP 2010. (Link is to Ms.Grimes website, and you can find the full paper on the publications page.)

Let me sum up the gist of the idea, rather than going into the details of the paper, as there are some fundamental problems with the study. The gist is that a casual game might be better suited for games that aim to improve behavior. The behavior here was based on healthy eating, and the research targeted African American individuals because of the high incidence of diabetes among that population. The game was designed with food items that such folks would find in their neighborhoods, including soul food type items, sandwiches, etc.

The critical part for me was the introduction of the casual game premise. I had been structuring my thesis idea around epistemic games, thinking only in terms of long story arc type things, and listening to this proposal has given me an alternate idea. I'm definitely going to need to start with an exploratory study to examine which of those two paths is going to be the better choice for me, I think. Additionally, discussing the shape of the study and what might have been a better question for the study format has helped me think about how to structure my own studies to avoid those types of critiques.

I'm likely going to blog about a few more of the papers that were interesting or that I discussed in a critical fashion with Leilah as well.

Academics: Very Smart, Very Dumb

I have one major complaint about UbiComp 2010 as far as comfort goes. The seatting arrangement during the presentations is a typical lecture hall, but one with absolutely no space to move if someone is sitting in a chair. For some reason, every single person will opt to sit on the very end of the row. This means that every person who is not in the lecture hall before the presentation begins has to squeeze past those folks who sat down first. This is particularly difficult as some folks refuse to stand up to let people pass.

This is particularly humiliating in my case. I'm not a small woman by most standards, and it. is. not. comfortable. for me to move myself and my laptop pass you. You're forcing me to choose to show you either my rear or my front in a small area. It is awkward for me. I can't imagine you're enjoying it that much, given your reluctance to even stand up. When I say "Excuse me," it isn't a request for you to turn your knees to the side, which adds maybe three inches to the first three that were there. I'm simply not six inches wide.

So please, colleagues. If you're organizing a conference, do choose a venue that it is accessible for various body types. If you're at a conference that doesn't have wide aisles, either sit near the center of the row, or be prepared to stand up when people need to get by.

A further update about UbiComp as far as interesting papers went will be posted either later today or tomorrow.