Parents fret about their kids spending too much time with digital devices, but many don’t realize that their efforts to limit screen time can backfire. Experts have reversed earlier guidelines about screen time, and recent research suggests that strict time-based rules can be harmful.
Read the full story at PopSugar.
Informatics Professors Aaron Trammell, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler, Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Bonnie Ruberg, along with Informatics Ph.D. student Amanda Cullen, will be on a game studies GeekEd panel on Sunday, July 23 from 12-1 p.m. during the Comic Conference for Educators and Librarians, a five-day conference that takes place at the San Diego Public Library and is affiliated with Comic-Con International. This is the second year that Comic-Con and the San Diego Public Library have teamed up for the five-day conference that explores the role comics play in promoting education and literacy for all ages.
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California-based Connected Camps is part of a growing offering of online camps that fill a unique niche to complement their traditional pine-and-mortar counterparts. Accessible across the U.S. and around the world, the camp offers programs in engineering, architecture, coding, animation, game design and storytelling, all hosted on custom Minecraft servers or delivered with MIT’s Scratch coding software. Each weeklong program connects kids with fellow campers and expert mentors who support the participants and share their expertise.
“We meet kids where they are, where they’re already engaged with social and interest-driven learning,” said Mimi Ito, a co-founder of Connected Camps and a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on how young people engage with digital media. “If you’re already messing around with redstone in Minecraft, this is a pathway for you to learn circuitry and get interested in engineering.”
Read the full story at KQED News.
If you are constantly checking your Facebook on your phone or browser, then there’s one thing you need to know: You’re not getting enough sleep, according to a recent research done at the University of California. Professor Gloria Mark, who led the study, asked students to fill out a sleep survey; activity was monitored on their phones and computers—logging when they switched from one window to another, texted or made a phone call.
“There have been lots of studies on how information technology affects sleep,” Mark was quoted in an article published by The Independent. “We did the opposite: We looked at how sleep duration influences IT [iformation technology] usage.”
Read the full story at BusinessMirror.
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has chosen five papers led by Ph.D. students in the Health and Information Lab within UCI’s Department of Informatics to be presented at the upcoming AMIA Annual Symposium in Washington, D.C., in November.
“We’ve had a very productive year and our students have some truly excellent work to present at the symposium,” said Kai Zheng, associate professor of informatics.
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Two student teams from UCI took the top two spots in this year’s IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) GameSIG Intercollegiate Computer Game Showcase on June 10 at the Cal State Fullerton Titan Student Union Pavilion.
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Informatics Ph.D. students Mark Baldwin and LouAnne Boyd were recognized with honorable mentions for the 2017 Ford Foundation Fellowship Program. Baldwin was among 410 individuals who received an honorable mention in the Predoctoral Competition, while Boyd was among 220 individuals who received an honorable mention in the Dissertation Competition.
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Aaron Soto, a graduate student in UCI’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCID) program within the Department of Informatics, and his team took second place in the 2017 New Venture Competition held May 12 at UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business. The competition was hosted by the Beall Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in collaboration with UCI Applied Innovation.
The team’s award-winning project was COMPAS, a product that uses computer access times, along with patient-to-room associations, to produce a live view of patient flow. Soto played a fundamental role in the business competition, having joined the team after meeting its founders at a UCI Cove networking mixer, by literally being their “boots on the ground,” attending various workshops and events to curate the necessary knowledge needed to compete, such as creating the pitch deck used for the competition.
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ICS alumni Julia Haines, Ph.D. ’15; Sun Young Park, Ph.D. ’14; and Julie Williamson, B.S. ’08 were recently recognized as members of the inaugural class of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Future of Computing Academy (ACM-FCA), a new initiative to support and foster the next generation of computing professionals. The goal of the ACM-FCA is to allow the next generation of researchers, practitioners, educators and entrepreneurs to develop an influential voice in their fields.
New UCI informatics professors Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire, internationally recognized educational gaming experts, believe they’re at the right place at the right time, when their field is experiencing a “golden age.”
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