Many educators believe that activities centered on electronic tangibles (ET) and robots are fun and motivating for their students. However, it is often difficult, given the nature of both new hardware and new curricula to tease apart the nature and causes of this excitement. Formally planned educational evaluations can help build a deeper understanding of the effects of the new program on students. However, evaluating the impact of new ETs can be a challenge. Classes and workshops utilizing ETs as teaching devices are by their nature hands-on and may not lend themselves to traditional exam-based assessments. After all of the effort required to design a new ET, plan an educational experience utilizing the technology, and then implement that plan with students, evaluation is sometimes left as an afterthought. Strong evaluation methods can provide important insights into ways to improve a design and help to show the impact of a program, resulting in increased opportunities for funding, dissemination, and replication.

This paper reports on the Design Compass, a classroom tool for helping students record and reflect on their design process as they work on and complete a design challenge. The Design Compass software provides an interface where students can identify and record the various design steps they used while performing them, and add digital notes and pictures to document their work. In the Design Log view, students can review steps taken, and print the record of work done, which can be shared and discussed with their instructor or classmates. The paper describes the concepts underlying the creation of the Design Compass, its features as a metacognitive tool and how it works, and provides scenarios of its use as a teaching and assessment tool with eighth-grade technology education students, and in teacher professional development workshops.

This paper introduces the IRIS mobile robot project. IRIS is a largely student designed and implemented mobile robot platform created to provide a mechanism for classroom explorations of topics in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics. It has been designed to be used by students from middle school through college.

Evaluating new educational programs and tools, especially those targeted at difficult-to-assess learning goals can be quite challenging due to the small number of participants typically engaged with pilot programs. The focus of the evaluation, then, should be on collecting rich data from each participant about their experience in the workshop and their progress towards meeting the workshop’s learning goals. We present a novel evaluation technique, the debugging task, that seeks to assess at post-workshop a participant’s independent ability to use the tools, skills, and materials of the workshop. The technique is presented in the context of Robot Diaries, a program to develop a robotics design activity centered on crafts materials and expressiveness, and targeted to middle school girls. The paper discusses the rationale for the debugging task, its implementation, and the results and analyses of girls completing the task.

We present the design and deployment of a physical computing platform developed for a crossdisciplinary introduction to biology and computer science. Using the accessible Arduino interface as its foundation, students instantiate increasingly nuanced physical interactions with the environment. Biological and computational ideas receive equal attention through three layered projects that span from circuit design through the co-evolution of predator-prey robot behaviors. The low-overhead platform presented here scales to support sophisticated projects at surprisingly modest time-and-money costs

For the past several years, we have been using robots in our introductory computer science course. Although this has been challenging for many reasons, it has also been very rewarding on a number of fronts, both for the students and for us. However, in order for this to occur, we had to adapt to what we perceived as “chaotic code.” In this paper we describe lessons learned by watching what the students do, where they have trouble, and what they enjoy. Further, we discuss what the implications of focusing on creativity has had on teaching and assessment.

In visual metaphor processing, one object, the target, is compared to and understood in terms of another object, the source. Several studies suggest that perceptual similarity between two objects enhances a conceptual link between the two. However, little is known about how perceptual features contribute to the establishment of this link. In the present experiment we investigated the processing of the four possible combinations of conceptually and perceptually similar picture pairs using a same-different task. In order to determine whether particular processes are bound to a particular time range, we manipulated the delay between the two successively presented pictures. We expected perceptual processing effects at a short delay and conceptual processing effects at a longer delay. We did not find evidence for this expectation. However, the results did show that (i) it took participants longer to give a ‘different’ response if two objects shared perceptual features than when they did not; (ii) this presence of perceptual similarity also resulted in more response errors; and (iii) if objects shared only perceptual features, participants in the long delay condition produced more erroneous responses than the participants in the short delay condition did. These results are discussed in light of metaphor processing models.

There are multiple and even interacting dimensions along which shape representation schemes may be compared and contrasted. In this paper, we focus on the following ques- tion. Are the building blocks in a compositional model lo- calized in space (e.g. as in part based representations) or are they holistic simplifications (e.g. as in spectral representa- tions)? Existing shape representation schemes prefer one or the other. We propose a new shape representation paradigm that encompasses both choices.

How is shape represented during spatial tasks such as mental rotation? This research investigated the format of mental representations of 3-D shapes during mental rotation. Specifically, we tested the extent to which visual information, such as color, is represented during mental rotation using methods ranging from reaction time studies, verbal protocol analysis, and eyetracking. Another set of studies examined whether people use piecemeal or holistic strategies to rotate complex objects. Results show that individuals with good rotation ability do not represent color during mental rotation and rotate whole shapes; whereas poor rotators do represent color and rotate individual pieces of the shape using piecemeal strategies. This work contributes to theories about cognitive shape processing by showing that different information processing strategies may be one cause of individual differences in mentally rotation performance.

In this study we show that humans form very similar perceptual spaces when they explore parametrically-defined shell-shaped objects visually or haptically. A physical object space was generated by varying three shape parameters. Sighted participants explored pictures of these objects while blindfolded participants haptically explored 3D printouts of the objects. Similarity ratings were performed and analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques. Visual and haptic similarity ratings highly correlate and resulted in very similar visual and haptic MDS maps providing evidence for one shared perceptual space underlying both modalities. To investigate to which degree these results are transferrable to natural objects, we performed the same visual and haptic similarity ratings and multidimensional scaling analyses using a set of natural sea shells.