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Understanding Context in Children's Use of Smartwatches for Everyday Science Reflections

Published: 12 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Although much has been written about the benefits of situated learning, its technology implementations have remained bounded in space and time in the form of scheduled sessions or designated spaces. Relatively little research has investigated how learning can be situated in the messy world outside of formal learning contexts. We propose that wearables like smartwatches, because of their intrinsic attributes such as persistence and ease-of-access, present an apt opportunity to explore how such 'messy' situated learning can happen. This paper investigates the notion of context in a 3-week study whereby 18 elementary school students used a custom smartwatch app called ScienceStories to record reflections related to specific science topics throughout the course of their everyday lives.
We advance a context model of wearables as situated reflection tools, and present our study findings that detail 'when' (time periods), 'where' (locations), 'why' (triggers) and 'how' (interactions of contextual dimensions) children made science reflections using the smartwatches. We conclude from our findings that a certain tension exists between watch interactions for the purpose of reflections and real-life experiences. We expected the watch to function alongside the child's everyday life but evidence points to a dialectic model. The work serves to inform the design of educational wearable apps perhaps to eventually move towards becoming effectively context-aware.

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  • (2024)“Are you smart?”: Children's Understanding of “Smart” TechnologiesProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655787(625-638)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Wrist-bound Guanxi, Jiazu, and Kuolie: Unpacking Chinese Adolescent Smartwatch-Mediated SocializationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642044(1-21)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IDC '19: Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
    June 2019
    787 pages
    ISBN:9781450366908
    DOI:10.1145/3311927
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 June 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. Children
    2. Context
    3. Everyday science
    4. Science education
    5. Situated learning
    6. Smartwatch
    7. Wearables

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    June 12 - 15, 2019
    ID, Boise, USA

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    IDC '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 41 of 124 submissions, 33%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)“Are you smart?”: Children's Understanding of “Smart” TechnologiesProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655787(625-638)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Wrist-bound Guanxi, Jiazu, and Kuolie: Unpacking Chinese Adolescent Smartwatch-Mediated SocializationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642044(1-21)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2023)Children with ADHD and their Care Ecosystem: Designing Beyond SymptomsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581216(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)The Context for Contextualizing - Design Implications for Adaptive Teacher Support Systems for More Relevant Instruction2023 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)10.1109/ICALT58122.2023.00027(71-73)Online publication date: Jul-2023
    • (2023)Supporting and understanding students’ collaborative reflection-in-action during design-based learningInternational Journal of Technology and Design Education10.1007/s10798-023-09814-034:1(307-343)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
    • (2022)A systematic survey on embodied cognitionInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2022.10047833:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2022
    • (2021)What do Teens Make of Personal Informatics?Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445239(1-10)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2021)Enhancing the Visual Efficiency for communicating students’ personal relevant information2021 International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)10.1109/ICALT52272.2021.00011(14-16)Online publication date: Jul-2021
    • (2020)LifeMosaicProceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3392063.3394429(519-531)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2020

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