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One challenge of child-computer interaction research is surveying variation of children's attitudes towards novel educational technology, which often results in an opinion ceiling effect. In this article, the authors introduce BiCo -- a bipolar continuous rating scale which builds on children's ability to draw relative comparisons. They elaborate on the development of BiCo and on how they designed it to better survey children's attitudes. Beyond addressing the opinion ceiling effect, BiCo is suitable for surveying a wide range of concepts and its invertible design enables simulation of inverted items. The authors provide data comparing BiCo with the widely used Smileyometer instrument when used by fourth-graders (around 10 years old), demonstrating that BiCo mitigates the opinion ceiling effect. They discuss BiCo as a new tool for children's technology evaluation and provide directions for future research.

Since 1998, we have been developing and researching CoWeb, a version of Wiki designed to support collaborative learning. In this article, we summarize our results of situating CoWeb across the academic landscape of Georgia Tech. In architecture, CoWeb enabled faculty to serve more students in a design-based course. In English composition, a comparison study demonstrated significant learning benefits without incurring disproportionate costs. Yet, situating CoWeb was not always successful. In many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes, students actively resisted collaboration. From these studies, we conclude that the culture of the classroom and the discipline needs to be compatible with the medium for computer-supported collaborative learning to be effective. Finally, we demonstrate how collaboration can be designed into the culture. A new class on introductory computing was explicitly designed to take advantage of the collaborative possibilities that CoWeb affords. We report our findings of the success of this approach. We characterize this research as a scholarship of application. We demonstrate that this mode of scholarship is a viable mode of scholarship in the learning sciences. Unlike traditional scholarship of discovery, we are not solely concerned with discovering new knowledge. Instead, we support others in the application of a new technology to serve genuine and complex learning situations. By doing so, we seek to understand the potential that one new medium, a Wiki, has for supporting learning.

This article introduces "medium-based" design -- an approach to creating "exploratory learning environments" using the method of "extending a medium". First, the characteristics of exploratory learning environments and medium-based design are described and grounded in related work. Particular attention is given to "extending a medium" -- medium-based design's core method. Then, the product and process of two environments are detailed to show how medium-based design enables the creation of exploratory learning environments. Finally, a study compares medium-based design to a conventional design process to test the hypothesis that medium-based design is particularly effective in creating exploratory learning environments. (Contains 8 figures and 3 tables.)

A study was conducted to understand collaborative games due to their simplicity and particular focus was given to Reiner Knizia's , considered by many to be the quintessential collaborative board game. The results illustrated some of the difficulties inherent to the design of these games as well as showing that simply having cooperative elements is generally insufficient for collaborative play.