The conveyance of knowledge of the life cycles performed by fungi and plants with spores is a challenge for teaching in university education. The life cycles of fungi, in particular, can be very complex and difficult to understand. This paper presents the development and implementation of a German and English educational software program,…

The first data structure that first-year undergraduate students learn during the programming and algorithms courses is the one-dimensional array. For novice programmers, it might be hard to understand different algorithms on arrays (e.g. searching, mirroring, sorting algorithms), because the algorithms dynamically change the values of elements. In…

We are so used to accept new technologies being the driver of change and innovation in human computer interfaces (HCI). In our research we focus on the development of innovations as a design process--or design, for short. We also refer to the entire process of creating innovations and putting them to use as "cognitive processes"--or…

We present CSTutor, a sketch-based interface designed to help students understand data structures, specifically Linked Lists, Binary Search Trees, AVL Trees, and Heaps. CSTutor creates an environment that seamlessly combines a user's sketched diagram and code. In each of these data structure modes, the user can naturally sketch a data structure on…

Purpose: Learning Chinese is unquestionably very important and popular worldwide with the fast economic growth of China. To most foreigners and also local students, one of the major challenges in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences that are considered as significant in the Chinese culture. However, due to…

Our research explores a virtual reality application based on Web camera (Webcam) input-interface. The interface can replace with the mouse to control direction intention of a user by the method of frame difference. We divide a frame into nine grids from Webcam and make use of the background registration to compute the moving object. In order to…

Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) are known to possess great potential in supporting learning because of their ability to simulate a real classroom learning environment. But research in this area has produced mixed results. The reason for this remains puzzling. This paper is written with two purposes: (1) to examine some recent research and…

Emotional expression in Artificial Intelligence has gained lots of attention in recent years, people applied its affective computing not only in enhancing and realizing the interaction between computers and human, it also makes computer more humane. In this study, emotional expressions were applied into intelligent tutoring system, where learners'…

A prototype application called the Fluid Reading Primer was developed to help emergent readers with the process of decoding written words into their spoken forms. The Fluid Reading Primer is part of a larger research project called Fluid Documents, which is exploring the use of interactive animation of typography to show additional information in…

Two controlled experiments examined whether the animated zooming effect accompanying the opening or closing of a folder in the Apple Macintosh graphical user interface aids in the user's perception of which window corresponds to which folder. Results suggest users may become attuned to the informational content of the zooming effect with…

In this study, the Bystander Turing Test (BTT) paradigm is used to determine whether participants rate particular dialog moves in tutoring transcripts to be generated by a computer tutor, AutoTutor, or by a skilled human tutor. Currently, AutoTutor initiates a conversation with the learner by posing a question or presenting a problem for the…

The authors are conducting a study of instructors teaching data structure and algorithm topics, with a focus on the use of diagrams and tracing. The results of this study are being used to inform the design of the Support Kit for Animation (SKA). This article describes a preliminary version of SKA, and possible usage scenarios. (Author/AEF)

The acceptance of animation technologies is increasing. Video games, such as Sony PlayStation (SONY, 2002), have become part of the culture for young people from kindergarten through undergraduate school. Animation technologies have been implemented into educational systems in the form of animated pedagogical agents (Johnson, 2000). The research…