Current Researchers: Michael Yeganyan, David Schramm, Meg Cramer, Monica Tentori and Gillian Hayes

Past Collaborators: Sen Hirano, Gabriela Marcu, Mohamad Monibi, David Nguyen

Project: Visual schedules and choice boards are tools used in current best practices for helping children with autism and other special needs. These non-verbal kids need help communicating their choices, understanding time and activities, and so on. We are working with Windows SmartPhone, Linux small displays, and large touchscreen-enabled platforms to develop solutions that ease these burdens, provide logging and visualizations of data, and help automate some of the features of using these communication techniques.

We are also investigating how novel recording technologies, like the Microsoft SenseCam can be used to augment communication between non-verbal children with autism and their caregivers – including both parents and teachers.

Watch a talk Gillian gave at Microsoft Research that covers some of the autism and FitBaby work:  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=121512

This work is supported in part by technical assistance and equipment through a collaboration with Microsoft Reserach Cambdridge.

This work is supported by AutismSpeaks Innovative Technologies For Autism program, a generous equipment donation from Nokia Research Palo Alto, and an NSF CAREER award.

The vSked and SenseCam for Autism projects will be presented at IMFAR 2008 in Chicago.

This work was presented at IDC as a poster at the main conference and at the Design for Children with Special Needs Workshop:

The vSked and SenseCam for Autism projects will be presented at IMFAR this year in Chicago.

This work was presented at IDC as a poster at the main conference and at the Design for Children with Special Needs Workshop:

vSked: Interactive Visual Scheduling Systems
Gillian R. Hayes
David Nguyen
Michael Yeganyan
Sen Hirano
Gabriela Marcu

SenseCam
Gillian R. Hayes
Gabriela Marcu

Mocotos:  Mobile Communications Tools for Children with Special Needs
Mohamad Monibi
Gillian R. Hayes

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems
Gillian R. Hayes
Donald J. Patterson
Mohamad Monibi
Sam Kaufman

This work was also presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research as a poster:

Design of Interactive Visual Scheduling Systems
Sam Kaufman
Donald J. Patterson
Gillian R. Hayes

An excerpt from the article….

Although mobile technologies are nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers in modern industrialized nations, they are rarely used in schools—places where these youth spend a significant percentage of their time. Today’s teenagers, 75% of whom own cell phones, are considered by many to be responsible for the rampant uptake of mobile social applications .Despite the increased capabilities of these systems and their arguable potential to improve learning, most public schools are far from the environments envisioned in pervasive computing. In the United States, more than 1200 hours annually are spent by the most connected generation in some of the least-connected places—schools.

Within formal school settings, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders negotiate a complex set of issues in regards to supporting the use of mobile phones and other portable networked devices. Efforts at technology integration in schools include installation of new networks, risk assessment surrounding use and abuse of networked communication, purchase and installation of new software, and more.  In addition to the technical challenges of bring new pervasive computing systems into schools, there are numerous legal and policies issues that surround the use and abuse of networked communication and applications.  These enormous challenges have meant that, to date, most learning designs for mobile phones have been developed for outside of the classroom use.

To fully explore the potential of mobile and social applications for learning, the community at large must consider use of mobile devices and networked applications in public schools to compliment our understanding of the use of these systems and services for youth and learning outside the schools. Specifically, Acceptable Use Policies in schools represent the current legal basis and historical precedents that define the climate of classroom mobile phone and social media use. Understanding these policies is an important first step to engaging with design and pedagogical practices as a joint community of teachers, researchers, and designers.  Rather than lay the responsibility of adapting teaching practices to technologies on teachers or the responsibility of adapting technologies to teaching practices on designers, in this paper, we explore how these issues can be addressed together.

Cramer, M.D. and Hayes, G.R. Acceptable Use in the Age of Connected Youth: How Risks, Policies, and Promises of the Future Impact Student Access to Mobile Phones and Social Media in Schools To Appear IEEE Pervasive Computing.

Girls get to “play engineer” by rotating through four roles each class period and wearing a button that says who they are and the great things they can do!

Multi-level mentoring includes professors working with college students working with high school students working with middle school girls!  We are all there together as a team, figuring things out.  Everyone has someone they can learn from and everyone has someone to mentor. In this way, we are able not only to introduce girls to technology but also to reinforce the interest in teenagers and young adults.

Special thanks to Barb Erickson for her guidance on this project as well as to Microsoft Research, NCWIT, and Google for their support.  And of course, thanks so much to Girls Inc, Sarah Drislane, and the ladies of WICS for their continued hard work!

Marcu, G., Kaufman, S.J., Lee J.K., Black, R.W., Dourish, P., Hayes, G.R., Richardson, D.J.  Design and Evaluation of a Computer Science and Engineering Course for Middle School Girls.  Proc SIGCSE 2010.

http://ncwit.org/news.blog.php?action=display&editorial_id=524

It’s also a good time to let everyone know that the women from WICS (Women in Information and Computer Sciences) at UCI are continuing this great work with their own workshops throughout this year!

Reaching Diverse Student Populations in Embedded Ubiquitous Educational Environments
Organized by Meg Cramer, Moderated by Gillian Hayes

Panelists: Tom Moher, UI Chicago; Walt Scacchi, UC Irvine; Roy Pea, Stanford; a representative from High Tech High School

The physical built environment in educational settings has profound implications for learning. Yet, many technologies for learning are simply re-appropriated computers built for business or home use.  This use of technology has seen minimal improvement for students, particularly for socially disadvantaged children for whom technology reform promised to level the playing field. In this panel, we will explore alternative embedded and ubiquitous computational environments in classrooms, schools and museums—taking seriously the impact of the physical instantiation of computation on the learning experience. These novel environments allow students to be immersed in dynamic learning experiences through tight integration of technology with physical space.

Panelists will explore key elements to creating and sustaining these learning environments and discuss how examining diverse cultures, pedagogies, and student populations impact the design and deployment of computational technologies in these environments. The panelists below will discuss how their projects individually cater to the needs of the urban, multilingual public school student body and communities of Chicago, Orange County, San Diego, and the Bay Area.

Panelists were chosen to represent a variety of learning environments (e.g., schools, museums) that all serve diverse, multi-cultural student populations. More on the event can be found at: http://dmlcentral.net/conference/

The Eureka! Summer Program is a 4-week intensive enrichment program for 60 girls who will be entering 7th, 8th or 9th grades. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the program. The goal of Eureka! is to provide girls an opportunity to interact with science and relative technology in a fun and exciting environment with the desire that girls become more interested in these fields. Girls Incorporated is a national nonprofit youth organization dedicated to inspiring all girls to be strong, smart, and bold.

Original Source

As a child, Gillian Hayes fainted a lot. Doctors asked her to write down how she felt and what she was doing each time she became woozy.

“I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. The solution is to create and track a bunch of records?” says Hayes, UC Irvine informatics assistant professor. “There had to be a better way.”

The experience piqued her interest in computerized record-keeping, particularly in the areas of healthcare and education. Today, Hayes designs computerized devices that help teachers work with children who have autism.

Gillian Hayes, UCI informatics assistant professor, designs technology that helps teachers work with children who have autism.

One device, called Selective Archiving, records video of a classroom. If a child with disruptive or dangerous behavioral tendencies acts up, the teacher presses a button to save that section of video, as with TiVo. He or she can then watch the recording after hours, when there are fewer distractions. If the button is never pressed, nothing is saved, which protects privacy.

Teachers of children with autism are required to document and analyze disturbing behavior over weeks or even months to determine trends and monitor progress. “Using our system, teachers at a test school went from a nearly 74 percent undocumented rate to just above 41 percent, which is pretty good when you consider how much happens in a busy classroom,” Hayes says.

Another device, Visual Scheduler (vSked for short), takes children with autism through exercises in which they identify the day of the week, the month, the weather outside and other things a teacher might ask in a typical elementary school classroom. On a handheld touch screen, they press a button to choose an answer. If they pick the wrong one, the correct button shakes and turns colors, eliminating the need for a teacher to physically point to the right answer.

Previously, the children stuck answers to a laminated folder using Velcro – a system that wasn’t able to track trends like always choosing the option on the left. “Those kinds of patterns are really hard to see in the analog, paper-based world, but they’re easy to spot with a computer,” Hayes says.

She’s also interested in record-keeping for people with chronic illnesses or conditions such as asthma and obesity, which can occur episodically throughout an individual’s life.

“We need to start thinking about healthcare over a lifetime and not just the acute moments of having the flu or breaking a leg,” Hayes says. “If we have data when we’re healthy, we’ll know much more quickly when we start to decline. The earlier we’re diagnosed, the better the outcome is going to be.”

Computing, she says, can be applied to most problems.

“Everything has computers – your car, the lights in your house, your microwave,” Hayes says. “By combining the things computers do well with human ingenuity, we can address almost any societal issue, from education to healthcare to the environment.”

— Jennifer Fitzenberger, University Communications

Related Links

• Gillian Hayes faculty profile
• Department of Informatics
• Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences

“Reconsidering Education and Learning in HCI: A Social Cultural View of Special Education and Technology” by Gillian R. Hayes will be presented at HCI in February 2008.

Abstract: This paper presents complementary views of education to the more traditional cognitive learning view of education represented in educational technology and HCI in education. This paper first presents a case study for which this extended model is considered and then overviews some of the historical treatment of education, special education, and technology for education.