Human-Computer Interaction

Offering training programs to their employees is one of the necessary tasks that managers must comply with. Training is done mainly to provide up-to-date knowledge or to convey to staff the objectives, history, corporate name, functions of the organization’s areas, processes, laws, norms or policies that must be fulfilled. Although there are a lot of methods, models or tools that are useful for this purpose, many companies face with some common problems like employee’s motivation and high costs in terms of money and time. In an effort to solve this problem, new trends have emerged in the last few years, in particular strategies related to games, such as serious games and gamification, whose success has been demonstrated by numerous researchers. According to the above, we present a systematic literature review of the different approaches that have used games or their elements, using the procedure suggested by Cooper, on this matter, ending with about the positive and negative findings.

This document presents an analysis based on a systematic review carried out on the most recognized topics related to academic emotions in the different mechanisms of research and emotional evaluation, trying to focus attention on the initial programming courses, based on the basic programming concepts, independently of the tool in which these concepts are applied, taking into account that the programming courses are considered relevant courses for the training of computer engineers; mechanisms for the evaluation of emotions are also identified. The main emotions in academic contexts are identified and the aim is to identify elements and analysis through the gender variable. Analyses are done focusing on academic emotions. Subsequently, the factors by which women are not linked to the area of software engineering are analyzed, from the perspective of the high drop-out rates due to the programming courses and the impact of the low participation of women in the software sector in the world order, taking into account the roles in which women perform satisfactorily in the software industry.

People with intellectual disabilities can use tablet computers and smartphones to enhance their learning and increase their independent living. Nevertheless, there is a dark side in the use of mobile devices, directed linked with distraction, dependency, and isolation, especially in young people. This research focuses in the question, what kind of activities does people with intellectual disability do with mobile devices? With this objective an empiric study was developed over a population of 25 teenagers of two countries: Mexico and Chile. It included direct observation, surveys, interviews, and active research over two uncontrolled and controlled scenarios. All observations, evaluations and analysis were divided in 3 groups: Usage focus, Performance, and Subjective appreciation, Results showed that the main usage of mobile devices by these teenagers was entertainment, being Youtube® the most popular application. The performance of users varies widely depending of the experience in the use of such devices, but all of them have troubles with text and tiny touchable objects. Users are really happy while using freely their mobile devices, it decreases when the activities area guided and limited by parents or teachers. Parents and teachers see with good eyes the use of mobile devices in classroom and home with educational meanings, but both declare their lack of knowledge in finding the right content.

Happiness is one of the most important components in life, however, qualifying happiness is not such a happy task. For this purpose, the World Happiness Report was created: An annual survey that measures happiness around the globe. It uses six different metrics: (i) healthy life expectancy, (ii) social support, (iii) freedom to make life choices, (iv) perceptions of corruption, (v) GDP per capita, and (vi) generosity. Those metrics combined in an index rank countries by their happiness. This index has been published by means of a static report that attempts to explain it, however, given the complexity of the index, the creators have felt that the index hasn’t been explained properly to the community. In order to propose a more intuitive way to explore the metrics that compose the index, this paper presents an interactive approach. Thanks to our information visualization, we were able to discover insights such as the many changes in the happiness levels of South Africa in 2013, a year with statistics like highest crime rate and country with most public protests in the world. In the same fashion, the application illustrates recent Yemen’s history, which in 2011 had a fall in the ranking, as in 2014 and onwards. Looking at the historical facts of this country, we see in 2011 a revolution began, explaining the fall in the happiness level, followed by a period of transition, that explains the peak in following years (2012–2013), finally, in 2014 the revolution continues, resulting in a civil war.

ChildProgramming is presented as a model for the teaching of programming to groups of children between 10 and 12 years old, applying collaborative, ludic and agile development strategies. Since its appearance in 2013, different projects have been developed at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the Universidad del Cauca, where this methodology has been applied in case studies that have allowed its validation and adjustment, making contributions to the conceptual model on issues as: the identification of computational abstraction processes applied by children when proposing a solution, the performance of the groups taking into account the shared knowledge (transactional memory), also of the organization by gender in the work teams, to propose solutions to computational problems and the development of competencies related to computational thinking. In the present article a general revision of the evolution of the methodology is made, and for each one of the related works the objective of the work is exposed, the new component within the original model, a description of this additional component and the results of the Validation when applying the case studies. Likewise, the future of methodology is presented in terms of the work that is being developed and the proposals for future work.

The development of algorithmic thinking is one of the most important concerns in the teaching-learning processes that must be taken into account for the development of a first Computer Programming course under the imperative paradigm. This article presents the results of the research obtained by combining collaborative processes with augmented reality tools as a didactic strategy for the development of algorithmic thinking in fundament programming teaching. The research was developed with students of first course of computer programming under a quasi-experimental design with the application of post-tests, whose data obtained were analyzed with the Student’s T-distribution. One of the activities of greater effort in the didactic area is to try to obtain maximum levels of attention in the student in each of the academic meetings in order to ensure better learning outcomes with the proposed strategies, for that reason, the study showed that the interactive didactic strategy enhanced the development of algorithmic thinking effectively.

The level of attention in people is associated with the efficiency in their intellectual activities, in their level of understanding and in the development of their creative ability. It is essential to know the behavior of the physiological variables involved in this process, with these variables the states of attention of a person can be determined with greater precision. Using this information, a person can have feedback on their cognitive activity and thus raise attention on the activity performed and consequently improve their cognitive performance. A common problem is the complexity of recovering the data by means of sensors since they are usually invasive and difficult to calibrate, they are usually single-user. So the signals can contain noise and generate an error in the diagnosis. In this work we propose the implementation of a non-invasive multi-user system, for the identification of the level of attention in people, based on at least two physiological variables of the user to determine it, as well as obtaining a better performance in reading the physiological variables, in the delivery of the final diagnosis and in the control of the level of attention of the people to improve their cognitive performance. Currently there are several commercial headbands used as sensors of brain waves. The manufacturers of these devices provide a graphical interface limited to specific applications. In this work, is shown a description of the development of data acquisition of three commercial brainwave diadems: Mindwave, MUSE and Emotiv Epoc. The data obtained are processed independently of the manufacturer’s software to obtain the level of attention of the users, implementing a monitoring system for each commercial device.

The learning programming is an arduous and complex process, which is why many individuals leave it quickly. One of the most frustrating tasks in this process is the debugging of the programs, which consists of understanding, locating and solving a bug. In this work two studies are carried out to extract the main strategies and resources used by teams of children to debug programs based on the block paradigm. The first study, from secondary sources, is a review of the literature from which it is conceptualized about the purification, its strategies and resources used. The second study, based on primary sources, is a case study in which the debugging strategies that a group of children implicitly use to understand, locate, and solve bugs are explored of programs not made by them. The studies have allowed to establish a set of strategies and resources, as well as a life cycle for the debugging of block-based programs.

STEM education relates to a set of disciplines relevant as: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Children with special needs (CSN) face many challenges in the classroom, since their learning may change depending on their disability or disorder. Teachers must use communication strategies and learning methods that can be adapted to their needs. The proposal is based on building a principal character, with one or several missions to fulfill, with whom the child can interact in areas of knowledge such as mathematics, literacy and computational thinking. The interactive toy called “Learning with Tobi” has the advantage of offering a rich playable environment in terms of use of multimedia and interactive usability, integrating the digital with traditional dolls. Nowadays, with the technology growth all the things tend to be connected. IoT offers a platform for sensors and devices to communicate seamlessly within smart environment and enables information sharing across platforms in a appropriate manner. Therefore, designing the Tobi interactive teddy bear, low-cost with electronic components and sensors as RFID, Gyroscope and Bluetooth to communicate through a mobile application and interacting with physical elements.

This article inquires about the appropriation level of the collaborative learning strategy that the students have of distance university programs. It is based on the elements of university work condensed in the Academic Pedagogical Solidarity Project (APSP) (2011) of the Open and Distance National University - UNAD of Colombia, which is the didactic pedagogical element and the pillars of collaborative work described by Puentes (2002) such as: communication; organization of activities and tasks; exchange of ideas; Contributions and responses in collaborative work and consensus and consolidation. This research is of a quantitative, non-experimental exploratory cross-sectional nature made to 315 students of the Western Zone of the University under investigation, to whom a questionnaire of 32 questions was applied, which after the process of descriptive analysis applying statistical techniques, concluded that The perception of the students regarding the level of appropriation of the collaborative work they have is “high”% without linking to the fulfillment of the components already described, which leaves in a critical position the development of the collaborative work in the institution and the open way to the approach of support actions from the computer sciences that guide and motivate in the virtual classroom the dynamics of the components of this learning strategy so important for distance education.

Natural user interaction has been recently identified as a field of interest of computer sciences, mainly due to the development of hardware devices that enable fast identification and recognition of gestures within a diversity of contexts. In this paper, the investigation of body gestures that users naturally perform to navigate virtual reality environments is reported. For this purpose, users were asked to show the commands they would perform when realizing basic navigation tasks within a virtual world, and they were observed following the Wizard of Oz approach. The performance gesture-based interaction is evaluated in terms of usability, contrasted with traditional desktop interaction, and analyzed. Finally, as result of this work, a set of gestures (language) to navigate virtual reality environments is defined, along with insights regarding this interaction modality, and comments on the future direction of natural user interfaces using full-body movement as input.

This article presents a review of high-level libraries that enable to recognize emotions in digital files of music. The main objective of the work is to study and compare different high-level content-analyzer libraries, showing their main functionalities, focused on the extraction of low and high level relevant features to classify musical pieces through an affective classification model. In addition, there has been a review of different works in which those libraries have been used to emotionally classify the musical pieces, through rhythmic and tonal features reconstruction, and the automatic annotation strategies applied, which generally incorporate machine learning techniques. For the comparative evaluation of the different high-level libraries, in addition to the common attributes in the chosen libraries, the most representative attributes in music emotion recognition field (MER) were selected. The comparative evaluation enables to identify the current development in MER regarding high-level libraries and to analyze the musical parameters that are related with emotions.

This research is presented to develop an interactive system integrating collaborative aspects, which can support in teaching of literacy as well as encouraging teamwork and enrichment of learning processes following a teaching method called ABCD-Spanish (in Spanish ABCD-Español) applied in children with moderate cognitive disabilities. The User Centered Design (UCD) methodology is applied to an interactive system that involves physical and digital elements in an interactive way, which can motivate to the child during the learning process, as well as provide constant feedback on the achievements obtained and the things that should be improved. This methodology guides the design according to the information obtained from the user, this makes the person the center of the design process. This project is presented like an inclusion opportunity for a group of people who deserve a quality education too. This research shows how the technology can be a tool to create new options and opportunities for everybody.

In this paper, we present an exploration of two location sensing mechanisms, such as QR codes and beacons, used in Location-based Learning Applications which are performed inside small indoor spaces (e.g. a classroom). The exploration of QR codes was carried out through an implementation of a Location-based Learning Application which was used by students between 7 and 11 years old inside of Primary Schools. Meanwhile, for the exploration of beacons, a functional prototype was made which was systematically tested by students of Faculty of Informatics of UNLP (Argentina). We analysed those characteristics that we have been learned related to how these mechanisms behave when they are used inside small indoor spaces because, in these cases, relevant places to provide learning contents are nearest from each other. We wish to create a discussion about the exploration of these two location sensing mechanisms. We expect that this discussion helps not only to design and develop Location-based Learning Applications, but also to improve authoring tools that are using to generate this kind of applications.

In this article, we present the design and construction of an open hardware-software system responsible for the characterization of the user context, through physiological signals such as: heart rate variability (HRV), galvanic skin response (GSR) and electromyographic signals (EMG), which allows to establish significant levels of mental stress (SI), arousal and valence, metrics important that make possible the inference of emotional states in the person. In addition, we describe the development of computational method for the inference of emotions and the mathematical calculations that involve this process. Finally, the hardware software system validation is presented through a video on demand service based on emotions, which includes a recommendation system that suggests a set of contents based on the user’s emotional behavior during the interaction with the service. This system aims to serve as a reference for the construction of other services based on the study of the user’s emotional behavior in different application contexts.

Augmented Reality Systems merge virtual content and the real world with real-time interaction and have features such as lighting conditions, sensor usage, and user position. These systems are very different from conventional applications that use mouse and keyboard; therefore, require a usability assessment to verify that they achieve their goals and their users goals, taking into account these specificities. When learning objects are constructed, it is necessary to guarantee their quality, measured by certain criteria in the pedagogical, content and technical components in addition to interaction components. The present work aims to discuss and present the usability assessment of Learning Objects developed in Augmented Reality, through an update of the usability heuristics proposed by Nielsen at the end of the 20th century, taking into account their specificities, such as the ease of manipulation of markers and degree of fidelity of the representation of the virtual objects added in the scenes.

To learn to read the child must understand a process that involves sensory, emotional, intellectual, physiological, neurological as well as cultural, economic, and political aspects. Reading is the correspondence between the sounds and the graphic signals, through the deciphering of the code and the understanding of the concept or idea. Reading difficulties can occur in a variety of ways during the learning process, and acquisition of this is an extremely important factor in favoring future knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to present an application based on two different approaches - conventional (mouse/keyboard) and non-conventional (gesture) interaction (using Kinect device) that allows to assist children in the reading process. The application is a game focused on three storybooks for kids. Details about the development approach (requirements analysis, project, implementation and tests) used are presented. We also present a usability test for conventional and nonconventional devices with 15 children in the literacy period.

Agile methodologies have proven their effectiveness in small teams; among them, Extreme Programming (XP) as the most used by the software industry and the scientific community. However, there are reports that report problems in applying agile parameters when the development team grows, and the project becomes more complex. The software architecture emerges as a mechanism to solve complexity and collaboration problems for complex projects and large development teams. This research proposes a method based on criteria of collaboration and Extreme Programming (XP) called Xp / Architecture (XA), to apply agile methods when the equipment grows, taking advantage of the capacity of the architecture methods proposed by the system engineering institute (SEI). Different XP teams work collaboratively in coordination with a team that incorporates agile architectural practices. The XA method was applied to three software projects, obtaining as a result, that the proposed model allowed to adhere Extreme Programming to larger teams and maintained the productivity proposed by the agile methodologies.