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Many users take advantage of digital self-control tools to self-regulate their device usage through interventions such as timers and lockout mechanisms. One of the major challenges faced by these tools is the user reacting against their self-imposed constraints and abandoning the tool. Although lower-risk interventions would reduce the likelihood of abandonment, previous research on digital self-control tools has left this area of study relatively unexplored. In response, this paper contributes two foundational principles relating risk and effectiveness; four widely applicable novel design patterns for reducing risk of abandonment of digital self-control tools (continuously variable interventions, anti-aging design, obligatory bundling of interventions, and intermediary control systems); and a prototype digital self-control tool that implements these four low-risk design patterns.

In careers involving user interface/user experience (UI/UX) design, an effective portfolio is key for showcasing one’s skills and knowledge to potential employers and collaborators. In this workshop, participants will gain insights into the fundamentals of UI/UX design, elements of effective portfolio design, and tools available to create a portfolio. This will be a highly interactive session as participants will interact with faculty and graduate students as well as with each other. Participants will be given the opportunity to have their pre-existing portfolio reviewed by the faculty and graduate student presenters in addition to members of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society student chapter at the University of Virginia.

Museums have been long recognized as legitimate places for out-of-school learning, offering unique experiences for large student groups. However, the challenges of assessing learning and engagement outcomes using technological interventions for large audiences, often undermine the value of these practices. To address the need for understanding how learning unfolds within the context of a museum visit as an interplay between the people, the interactives, and the mediators, we conducted a design evaluation in a science museum. Our focus was understanding the impact of audience interaction on learning and engagement during collaborative games for large student groups. For the purposes of this case study we also designed a physical board game having the dual purpose of a learning activity and an assessment tool. We present the results of our observations and discourse analysis, and discuss them in the light of our previous study in public schools.

Considering the shift of museums toward digital experiences that can satiate the interests of their young audiences, we suggest an integrated schema for socially engaging large visitor groups. As a means to present our position, we propose a framework for audience involvement with complex educational material, combining serious games and virtual environments along with a theory of contextual learning in museums. We suggest that effective learning with school groups visiting museums can occur through the facilitation of coordinated activities of young participants with appropriately designed technological mediation. We use the term orchestrated learning to present our rationale on how such activities can lead to enhanced learning through increased motivation and social interactions. In order to validate our framework, we built a testbed application that supports collaborative gameplay of small and large student groups. The application, named C-OLiVE: Collaborative Orchestrated Learning in Virtual Environments, is a 3D simulation game that allows participants to learn the process of olive oil production. The game has been used so far in three studies with 710 students in schools, summer camps, and a museum. We describe the modes of visitor involvement that were designed and tested with middle school students in the different learning settings. Finally, we present our most important findings and discuss their implications for the design of interactive digital experiences for young audiences visiting museums. These findings serve both as evidence for the applicability of our framework and as a guidepost for the direction we should move to foster richer technology-mediated social engagement of young crowds in museums.

One of the most popular audiences of museums is classroom-size groups of students, in the context of school field trips. However, students do not get adequate involvement during interactive group experiences, which might affect their impression and learning gained from the visit. In this paper, we present our findings from a recent study in middle schools, where 507 students were engaged with their class in a learning game about olive oil production. We had two players directly control the game and varied the level of involvement of the audience (the rest of the class), using iPads. We found that higher involvement in the game afforded greater retention of information after two days, while there was no difference after one day. Also, students with direct agency in the game revealed greater learning gains than the audience members. Results about the impact of socioeconomic status and social interactions on learning are reported, along with the most important design implications.

Museums are rich and complex learning experiences, using a variety of interactive approaches to engage their audiences. However, the largely unstructured nature of free-choice learning calls for alternative approaches that can effectively engage groups of school age students with diverse cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we present our findings from a recent study in a museum in Greece, where triads of students had to learn about olive oil production using a game enabling different levels of interactivity and collaboration. We found that facilitation by an expert guide led to greater learning gains as compared to students playing alone, with one or three simultaneous game controllers. We also compared these results with a previous controlled experiment conducted in the US with middle school students, using the same game but without the ecologically valid facilitation. Drawing ideas from sociocultural and cognitive theories we interpret the contradictory findings, identifying the impact of culture on their (social) interactions, their subjective game experience, and eventually learning, in these spaces.

In informal learning spaces employing digital content, such as museums, visitors often do not get adequate exposure to content, or they passively receive instruction offered by a museum docent to the whole group. This research aims to identify which elements of co-located group collaboration, virtual environments, and serious games can be leveraged for an enhanced museum learning and entertaining experience. We developed C-OLiVE, an interactive virtual environment supporting tripartite group collaboration, which we used to explore our hypothesis that synchronous, co-located, group collaboration will afford greater learning compared to conventional approaches. In an empirical study, we found some evidence supporting this hypothesis, taking into consideration other factors such as game experience and social presence. Students participating in the three-player condition demonstrated a better understanding of the collaborative tasks compared to their single-player counterparts. We discuss these results and outline future studies using the same virtual environment.

Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly seen as a core literacy skill for the modern world on par with the longestablished skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. To promote the learning of CT at a young age we capitalized on children's interest in play. We designed RabBit EscApe, a board game that challenges children, ages 610, to orient tangible, magnetized manipulatives to complete or create paths. We also ran an informal study to investigate the effectiveness of the game in fostering children's problemsolving capacity during collaborative game play. We used the results to inform our instructional interaction design that we think will better support the learning activities and help children hone the involved CT skills. Overall, we believe in the power of such games to challenge children to grow their understanding of CT in a focused and engaging activity.

In informal learning spaces employing digital content, such as museums, visitors either do not get adequate exposure to content or get information through passive instruction offered by a museum docent to the whole group. This research aims to identify which elements of co-located group collaboration, virtual environments, and serious games can be leveraged for an enhanced learning experience. Our hypothesis is that synchronous, co-located, group collaboration will afford greater learning compared to conventional approaches. We developed C-OLiVE, an interactive virtual learning environment supporting tripartite group collaboration, which we will use as a testbed to respond to our research questions. In this paper, we discuss our proposed research, which involves exploring some benefits of the involved technologies and proposing a list of design guidelines for anyone interested to exploit them in developing virtual environments for informal learning spaces.

We designed a collaborative navigation interface in which one user (the controller) guides a second, remote user (the navigator) through a 3D game environment. Both sides of the interface use commercially available gaming hardware. The controller uses full-body gestures to send navigation cues to the navigator, who travels through the environment using typical 3D gaming controls. In an exploratory study, all participants completed the game scenario, and they viewed the system as usable and fun overall, although the limited communication provided by the system was somewhat of a hindrance to collaboration. Navigators, who were led to believe they were being guided by an intelligent system, did not guess that guidance was provided by another human, and felt that an "intelligent system" would typically be more consistent than a human being.

Informal learning in public spaces like museums and location-based entertainment venues is increasingly popular during the last years. Especially in technology-enhanced museums such properties as Virtual Reality, Game-Based Collaboration, and Immersive Displays are considered to bear significant educational value. After extensive literature review we have come to the conclusion that little to no research has been carried out on the learning outcomes of these powerful properties. Thus, the scope of our research is to investigate the learning efficacy of an integrated schema of audience collaboration and game design in immersive virtual reality environments. In order to achieve this, we are going to build and evaluate a theoretical framework that supports collaboration within an audience of 9--14 years old children.

Informal or free-choice learning has become a well-established means of disseminating knowledge to school classrooms over the last years. Various technology-enhanced public spaces, like science centers and cultural heritage museums, are nowadays equipped with state-of-the-art digital dome theaters, where groups of people (mainly children) attend educational programmes. The overwhelming majority of such 'shows' include astronomical phenomena and in few cases cultural heritage. In this paper, we investigate the potential learning benefit of integrating audience interaction with gaming environments in the immersive space of a dome theater. In order to achieve this, we examine how six factors of the Contextual Model of Learning proposed by Falk & Dierking, can be applied in an integrated schema of group interactivity and game design in immersive learning environments.