The University of California, Irvine has received a five-year, $14.7 million Education Innovation & Research expansion grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand its Pathway to Academic Success Project, which helps close reading and writing achievement gaps among high-needs students in grades seven to 11.
Read the full story at UCI News.
In less than six months of working together, a UC Irvine doctoral candidate and the director of a charitable organization offering recreational therapy for the visually impaired have developed special canoes that allow the blind to paddle solo.
The idea had been on the mind of the nonprofit Makapo Aquatics Project’s executive director, RJ De Rama, for several years, but plans were roadblocked by expensive designs or labor-intensive project proposals.
The missing link, as it turned out, was UCI graduate student Mark Baldwin, who has a knack for creating low-cost, do-it-yourself solutions for challenges facing the blind community.
Read the full story at The Los Angeles Times.
Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine who studies how young people use technology, says it’s not necessarily because the teachers or the people making edtech tools have bad intentions. She argues that understanding another person’s situation is tough if you don’t share that experience. EdSurge recently sat down with Ito at the Intentional Play Summit to get her thoughts on equity in edtech, creativity and how kids’ relationship to technology has changed over the years.
Read the full story at EdSurge.
Professor Gillian Hayes is a risk-taker. Her pursuit of what she calls “wacky ideas” has resulted in products that improve quality of life for the disabled and those caring for them: a remotely controlled harness that lets blind children go canoeing; an app to store medical records for children with autism that saves parents time and simplifies interaction with doctors; an app that teaches and reminds autistic youth about common hygiene practices.
In offices, people get interrupted repeatedly throughout the day. … Interruptions cost the United States an estimated $650 billion a year. University of California, Irvine computer scientist Gloria Mark estimates that it takes 25 minutes, on average, to get back to task! Some people in the study never did.
Read the full story at Quartz.
Gregory D. Abowd, Regents’ Professor and J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia
Tech, has had a profound impact in computing research over his career. In 2018, his 30th PhD student graduated, marking a major academic milestone for Abowd. His academic family extends even further with more than 100 students who have been advised by his graduates at some of the world’s top universities.
Read the full story at the Georgia Institute of Technology website.
Reactions on text threads and social media aren’t that different from smiling or nodding while someone is talking. “They are niceties that express that we’re listening, signal interest, and keep the conversation going,” says Paul Dourish, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine.
Read the full story at Wired.
Felienne interviews Marian Petre & André van der Hoek on their book Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think. We talk about the software design process, which Petre & van der Hoek en discuss about in their book too. While there are a lot of books about software design, their books address designers rather than the design process itself. What do great designers do differently? Petre and van der Hoek distilled 66 insights about design from scientific research, such as ‘experts keep it simple’ and ‘experts try the opposite’. We talk about how to get better at designing, and how to work together on a design as a team of developers.
Listen to the interview at Software Engineering Radio.
Being a student is tough. On top of trying to succeed academically, one has to navigate the social aspect of making friends, interacting with others, and figuring out one’s identity. Now, imagine doing all that while being homebound. UC Irvine Informatics Professor Emeritus Judy Olson and NIH-funded Postdoctoral Fellow Veronica Newhart can help. They use groundbreaking technology – telepresence robots – to help students with chronic illnesses go from homebound to school bound.
Read the full story at UC IT Blog.
A space-exploring robot crashes on a distant planet. In order to gather the pieces of its damaged spaceship, it needs to build emotional rapport with the local alien inhabitants. The aliens speak a different language but their facial expressions are remarkably humanlike.
This fantastical scenario is the premise of a video game developed for middle schoolers by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers to study whether video games can boost kids’ empathy, and to understand how learning such skills can change neural connections in the brain.
Read the full story at the University of Wisconsin-Madison website.