Sharon Lynn Chu

University of Florida | UF · Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering

The outbreak of Covid-19 challenged the education system and caused more disconnections than ever between instructors, students, and content. Having instructors use personal information relevant to their students within a lesson would create a more personalized lesson that could resonate with the students and facilitate their participation in the c...

Storytelling support has been and continues to be a recurring theme in child-computer interaction research, especially as it pertains to education. This work has spilled over into practice, and, in the last few decades, a large number of storytelling systems for children have been developed—both as research prototypes and commercial applications. H...

In the face of information technology changes, not all students will have access to the means to prepare for this future of work. In addressing this issue, in this study, the authors investigate the impact of a ‘Making as Micro-Manufacturing (M²)' model in motivating STEM-activity participation and developing self-efficacy among high-schoolers hail...

In the face of ever-growing advancements in information and manufacturing technology, the future of work will demand cross-disciplinary skills. In such a future, individuals will need to continually acquire a breadth of skills and knowledge that goes beyond any one discipline. At present, our education system follows a siloed model whereby students...

Recommender systems assist users by providing recommendations based on some filtration criteria to reduce information overload. Embedding context-awareness allows recommender systems to use context information around the user, situation, and system to adapt and provide more efficient, relevant, and personalized recommendations. However, embedding c...

Wearable devices are a popular class of portable ubiquitous technology. These devices are available in a variety of forms, ranging from smart glasses to smart rings. The fact that smart wearable devices are attached to the body makes them particularly suitable to be integrated into people’s daily lives. Thus, we propose that wearables can be partic...

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 learni...

Mental health therapy often involves the reflection and reconstruction of one’s life narrative. However, few, if any existing digital interventions support a narrative-oriented therapeutic reflective process. College students may benefit from a digital support for mental health therapy, as they often need accessible, self-help ways for mental healt...

Wearable devices are ubiquitous technology, which is attached to the user itself, allowing it to be available in various everyday life settings. With the growing popularity and increasing affordability of smart wearables devices, their uses are also growing. Traditionally wearables have been used for health and fitness tracking, but now wearable ar...

Puppet-basedsystems have been developed to help children engage in storytelling and pretend play in much prior literature.Many different approaches have been proposed to implement suchpuppet-based storytelling systems, and new storytelling systems are stillroutinely published, indicating the continued interest in the topic across domains like child...

With advances in areas such as sensors and machine learning, wearable technologies will have increased potential to support our daily lives. Even though today’s landscape of smart wearable devices is highly varied, the real-world adoption of wearables has remained lukewarm. We propose that a key reason is that we currently only have a surface-level...

We often get questions about the processes and things that we observe in our surroundings, but there exists no practical support for exploring these questions. Exploring curiosity can lead to learning new science concepts. We propose using a post-event recall and reflection approach to support curiosity-inspired learning in everyday life. This...

Problem‐solving involves both cognitive and physiological changes. Since most prior work has focused on examining the cognitive side of problem‐solving, there is more to explore on the physiological side, including skin conductance. The present study examined skin conductance reactivity (SCR) to the moment participants solved three different types...

Capturing the player’s emotions in an interactive story can serve many purposes, such as to understand player response to a story or to alter the story’s path. The concept of diegesis defines the boundary between the story world and the real world, and has been used to explore different ways of conceptualizing user interface (UI) elements in intera...

This paper aims to explore how children use body-based enactment as a scaffold to compose written stories. We conducted a study where 17 children use a digital story authoring tool to enact and record stories as videos, then write the stories on paper while viewing their acting videos. We compared narrative structure and coherence in story enactmen...

It is becoming increasingly common for intelligent systems, such as recommender systems, to provide explanations for their generated recommendations to the users. However, we still do not have a good understanding of what types of explanations work and what factors affect the effectiveness of different types of explanations. Our work focuses on exp...

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 d...

It is becoming increasingly common for intelligent systems, such as recommender systems, to provide explanations for their generated recommendations to the users. However, we still do not have a good understanding of what types of explanations work and what factors affect the effectiveness of different types of explanations. Our work focuses on exp...

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...

When we share ideas through conversation, we convey a specific mental image to another person. However, mental images don't always match, and the effort it takes to stop and achieve common ground would interrupt conversational flow. We are currently investigating the design of a system that translates a speaker's gestures and speech into a visualiz...

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...

This paper explores the effects of story creation interfaces for children that embody different types of psychologically-grounded cognitive approaches. Two versions of a story creation interface for children were created: one leads the user to focus on a macro-level structure of their story before furnishing scene details, while the other leads the...

Current systems that use gestures to enable storytelling tend to mostly rely on a pre-scripted set of gestures or the use of manipulative gestures with respect to tangibles. Our research aims to inform the design of gesture recognition systems for storytelling with implications derived from a feature-based analysis of iconic gestures that occur dur...

This paper explores avatar identification in creative storytelling applications where users create their own story and environment. We present a study that investigated the effects of avatar facial similarity to the user on the quality of the story product they create. The children told a story using a digital puppet-based storytelling system by in...

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...

Making refers to the hands-on practice of creating technology-based artifacts that typically involves things like electronics, programming, and 3D printing. Practices in Making have been spearheaded by the rise of the Maker movement, resulting in the spread of Makerspaces for both young people and adults worldwide. However, Making is also being inc...

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-...

Although much has been written about the benefits of situated learning, its technology implementations have remained bounded in space and time in the form of scheduled sessions or designated spaces. Relatively little research has investigated how learning can be situated in the messy world outside of formal learning contexts. We propose that wearab...

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 's...

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...

With increasing focus on integrating 3D printing in educational settings, more emphasis needs to be placed on how to introduce young students to the complexities of the 3D printing process. Inspired by the patrons of 3D printer services, we engage children in a simplified 3D printing process. We conducted a study with two 3rd grade public school sc...

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...

Relatively little research exists on the use of smartwatches to support learning. This paper presents an approach for commodity smartwatches as a tool for situated reflection in elementary school science. The approach was embodied in a smartwatch app called ScienceStories that allows students to voice record reflections about science concepts anyti...

An important aspect of the Making ethos is the creation of artifacts that are personally significant through technological means. Many Making activities implicitly presume that participants have the mindset needed to be able to engage in such meaning-making processes before participation. We argue that attention has to be paid to how individuals ma...

The Maker phenomenon revolves around the technology-enabled hands-on production of artifacts, and has been consistently proposed as a vehicle for STEM education and to inculcate a 'Maker mindset' in children. While Making is physical and activities for children typically take place in physical venues like Maker camps and workshops, much information...

Our work investigates how Making may be used in the context of scientific modeling in formal elementary school science classes. This paper presents an investigation of fourth- and fifth-grade students engaging in Making activities to create simulation, concept-process, and illustrative models in the science classroom. Based on video analyses of the...

This paper extends the concept of digital literacy and applies it to Making. Through case descriptions, we contribute an understanding of how children can become or fail to become individuals literate in Making within a formal learning context. Our analysis draws from video recordings and other data sources of two 4th grade classrooms in which the...

Prior research investigating the effects of incorporating Making into educational contexts has been limited to snapshot studies. These studies however do not allow for the investigation of aspects that require longer-term development and nurture. We present a longitudinal study that investigates the effects of Making on children's degree of science...

Little is understood on how to design wearables for education, especially for children. We explore how smartwatches may allow children to see the world through the lens of science. In our study, 20 children are tasked to record stories related to specific scientific concepts in their daily life and drawing from their embodied experiences using a co...

This paper proposes storytelling as a motivational framework for the design of technologies aimed at supporting cognitive activity in older adults. The major design framework that has been used to motivate older adults to engage in cognitive support technologies is gamification, which may not be in tune with seniors' actual context. We describe a m...

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 interventio...

In this article, we investigate the child’s experience of fun and learning within curriculum-integrated Maker activities in the elementary school classroom. Little is currently understood as to how Making makes learning fun, particularly in formal educational contexts. We conducted an in-the-wild week-long study that implements Maker activities des...

We present Making activities designed and observed within the formal environment of elementary school classrooms. Using a collaborative curriculum-matching design process with teachers, 8 Maker activities and lesson plans were developed, and implemented in Science and Language Arts classrooms of a school with a large percentage of students from und...

The study of Making to support children's cognitive or social needs is gaining prominence rapidly. However, little research in Making focuses on children's motor skills and abilities, especially at younger ages. Arguing that Making provides greater benefits when introduced at elementary school-aged, this paper contributes to the understanding of ho...

This paper addresses the use of storytelling as a frame-work to design systems that support high-level thinking. Specifically, we examine whether narrative-based visual design may help students to perform better in literature review & synthesis. A prototype system 'StoryTree' was developed to enable a user study with tertiary students. Initial resu...

The electronics Making phenomenon, spearheaded by the introduction of open source microprocessors and 3D printers, has been quickly infiltrating into children’s domains, but how Making interacts with storytelling has not been addressed. This paper achieves the following: it proposes the argument of instrumental interaction for Making-based storytel...

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 a...

The vision of Vannevar Bush and Douglas Englebart of using computers to augment the human intellect more than half a century ago has been taken to heart by technology designers and computer scientists. Much technological progress has been made that allows the rampant use of laptops, desktops, tablets and smartphones in daily tasks to help us in thi...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of materiality in tangible interaction design for 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-...

A method for increasing the interest level of a digital image to a particular person based on an interest level function that determines an interest level of a particular digital image to the particular person responsive to familiarity levels of image elements in the particular digital image. The initial digital image includes one or more image ele...

A method for presenting digital images having a high interest level to a particular person selected from a set of candidate digital images. The candidate digital image are analyzed to designate one or more image elements, and familiarity levels are determined of the designated image elements to the particular person. For each candidate digital imag...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how young children associate materiality and meanings and how it can benefit tangible interaction design. To study this, we developed a research prototype, Stampies that allows playful tangible interactions. Stampies consists of tangible objects made out of different materials (wood, felt, silicone, and p...

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...

This paper presents Touch Wire, a learning environment for teaching the basics of electricity and electronic design to young children. Touch Wire combines a digital touch screen interface with tangible components to bring the concepts of electronic circuitry to the forefront, while removing the tedium of tasks such as wiring for young children. Gro...