Vishesh Kumar

Northwestern University | NU · School of Education and Social Policy

In this paper, we present SCAMP – Social Configuration Affordances for Museum Play – an analytical framework we develop and use to highlight the relationship between designed affordances at interactive museum exhibits and different social playful behaviors they trigger and support. We do this through a selective case study analysis of Rainbow Agent...

This paper presents an implementation of Connected Spaces (CxS)-an ambient help seeking interface designed and developed for a project-based computing classroom. We use actor network theory (ANT) to provide an underutilized posthumanist lens to understand the creation of collaborative connections in this Computational Action-based implementation. P...

The ISLS has long been focusing on innovative learning that supports inclusive socio-emotional and collaborative practices, and more recent research has taken up political and ethical dimensions of human learning as central to design, practice, partnership and research. The society is also taking concrete steps towards structural changes in its own...

With the current rising need for sustainability education, understanding the interconnected political, economic, ecological, and social systems that motivate (system level) change, can be uniquely addressed through immersive multiplayer games. Immersion through a mixed reality experience, face to face interactions, and game mechanics that push play...

A driving factor in designing interactive museum exhibits to support simultaneous users is that visitors learn from one another via observation and conversation. Researchers typically analyze such collaborative interactions among museumgoers through manual coding of live-or video-recorded exhibit use. We sought to determine how log data from an int...

This paper describes the design of a collaborative game, called Rainbow Agents, that has been created to promote computational literacy through play. In Rainbow Agents, players engage directly with computational concepts by programming agents to plant and maintain a shared garden space. Rainbow Agents was designed to encourage collaborative play an...

In this paper, we present the motivation for, and design of, City Settlers, a participatory simulation. In City Settlers learners engage in collaborative embodied play, competition, and sensemaking within the domains of sustainability, environmental complex systems, and city building. Learners work in teams running separate but interconnected citie...

Makerspaces, especially in their diverse proliferating forms, support a broad variety of learning outcomes. There is rich work in attempting to understand and describe these learning goals. Yet, there is a lack of support for practitioners and educators to assess the learning in their events, without extensive video-recording and documentation. In...

Although educators, researchers, and designers have increasingly advocated for developing computational thinking (CT) in young children, the vast majority of CT learning environments fail to support the development of positive attitudes towards problem solving, confidence in dealing with complexity, and communicating and working with others to achi...

In many video games, failure can be an indicator that you are, in some way, progressing (Juul, 2013). This is often through challenging content which may take multiple attempts to complete. In education failure can also be seen as an underpinning of learning. In this study, we investigate the influence of failure on thinking skills in an educationa...

This paper presents Connected Spaces (C-S) -- a tool designed to promote collaboration in makerspaces. It also describes a pilot study designed to test C-S's effectiveness in enabling people to seek help from peers. In our pilot, some (but not all) students were able to leverage C-S's affordances. We explore both supporting and mitigating factors,...

In this paper, we describe a tablet application designed around an interactive game-based science museum exhibit. It is aimed to help provide museum docents useful information about the visitors' actions, in a way that is actionable, and enables docents to provide assistance and prompts to visitors that are more meaningful, compared to what they ar...

Research has shown that supporting tinkering and exploration promotes a wide range of STEM related literacies. However, the open-endedness of tinkering environments makes it difficult to know whether learners' exploration is productive or not. This is especially true in museum spaces, where dwell times are short and facilitators lack a history of e...

We present the design of Note Code -- a music programming puzzle game designed as a tangible device coupled with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Tapping patterns and placing boxes in proximity enables programming these "note-boxes" to store sets of notes, play them back and activate different sub-components or neighboring boxes. This system provi...

With the aim of preparing a tangible interface for a fascinating context or scenario that sees frequent usage of cameras, or has the potential for camera usage in an interesting manner -- we conceptualized and prototyped Restorama -- a tool that automatically takes a panorama when sitting on a restaurant table. This eases the tedium of taking panor...

In our pursuit to restore delight in email, and making it more human, we recalled a common hobby of ours that was being lost in abandoning snail mail, for the technologically advanced e-mail. This paper explores a concept that, in a playful manner symbolized by stamps, reignites the elements of glee that used to belong to handling traditional lette...

This paper explores the efficacy of using an alternate text input system for the blind, based entirely on Braille alphabets for touch-screen mobile devices. A comparative study was performed wherein a prototype application developed by the authors was compared against the Voice-Over technology developed for iOS (Apple's mobile operating system. The...