Some people just see the world differently.
Dr Michael Cowling is certainly one of them. He’s determined to leave no technological stone unturned to find better ways of teaching and learning.
The CQUniversity researcher has returned from six months in the USA, working at the cutting-edge of augmented reality and 3D printing with Theresa Jean Tanenbaum and Karen Tanenbaum, from the Transformative Play Lab at University of California Irvine.
Read the full story at The Chronicle.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, studied workers and found that they lost some 23 minutes to each interruption. Harris places our attention — and how we use it — in urgent terms: “If the average person surrenders to the world,” he says, “it’s not safe — you get plagued by credit card debt, bad food. The default world doesn’t represent your best interest.”
Read the full story at OZY.
The Nov. 1 launch of a “Minecraft” version tailored for the classroom is exciting educators and parents alike.
“Because they added some new modifications for teachers to better manage their class, and to be able to do things like coding and other things that teachers are interested in, it’s just easier for teachers to adopt it,” says Mimi Ito, research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California—Irvine. Ito also is a co-founder of Connected Camps, a for-profit online learning organization through which teenage coaches use “Minecraft” to teach younger children computer coding and Spanish.
Read the full story at U.S. News & World Report.
Informatics Professor and Chair André van der Hoek traveled to the Bay Area last week to pay a special visit to Electronic Arts (EA), where he discussed collaborative opportunities and the potential ways for EA to support the computer game science major that is housed in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). A special thanks to UC Irvine alumna Laura Teclemariam (B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004) for hosting van der Hoek and Ed Hand, assistant dean for development. We look forward to seeing how we can continue working together with EA to provide better opportunities for all of our ICS students.
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SuccessfulStudent.Org recently ranked UC Irvine 33rd out of its top 57 video game colleges of 2016. Not bad, considering that last year UCI didn’t make the website’s list. According to the website, SuccessfulStudent.org ranks colleges from the student’s point of view based on factors such as well-rounded academics, cost, career prospects in the gaming industry, cutting-edge technological instruction, a track record of graduates making an impact in commercial video games, and proximity to video game and entertainment epicenters.
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Comedian Chris Hardwick of Comedy Central’s late-night @Midnight with Chris Hardwick shares the results of a recent UC Irvine study that links selfies to happiness.
The results of the study by Informatics researchers Yu Chen, Gloria Mark and Sanna Ali were published in Psychology of Well-Being in September 2016.
“Our research showed that practicing exercises that can promote happiness via smartphone picture taking and sharing can lead to increased positive feelings for those who engage in it,” said lead author Yu Chen, a postdoctoral scholar in UCI’s Department of Informatics.
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The UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences hired four new faculty members who started in the fall 2016 quarter. All of them are recognized leaders in their communities and will help ICS maintain its strength in a broad array of information and computer science domains. Please help us welcome these talented researchers:
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Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics Paul Dourish returned from a recent sabbatical at the IT University of Copenhagen. There, he encountered a useful practice: Shut up and write.
Exactly as it sounds, “Shut up and write” is a weekly gathering for faculty, students and anyone else to gather and have a silent meeting where they … well, write!
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A recent study says that taking selfies could offer more than just instant gratification. The study, from the University of California, Irvine, says taking more smiling selfies increases your chances of happiness.
View the story at CBS News.
A paper written by Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Chair in Informatics Gillian Hayes and informatics Ph.D. students Kathryn Ringland, Christine Wolf, LouAnne Boyd and Mark Baldwin has been named a Best Paper Finalist at the ASSETS 2016 Conference. The paper titled, “Would You Be Mine: Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism,” will be presented by Ringland at the conference in Reno, Nev., on Oct. 24 during a session on Users with Developmental Disabilities. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing, the ASSETS Conference explores the design, evaluation and use of computing and information technologies to benefit people with disabilities and older adults.