The emergence of Intelligent Classrooms, and in particular classrooms equipped with facilities for identifying the students’ attention levels, has raised the need for appropriate student-friendly tools that not only facilitate application hosting, but also acts as the means to re-engage inattentive students in the educational process. This work presents CognitOS, a web-based working environment that hosts several types of applications (i.e., exercises, multimedia viewer, digital book) that are utilized as channels to present interventions dictated by the intelligent decision-making mechanisms of the attention-aware classroom. This paper presents the functionality of CognitOS and the design process followed for its development.

This paper presents COIN-O-RAMA, an interactive exhibit designed for exploring and further engaging with coins in physical exhibitions. The key motivation was to create an appealing and user friendly system, augmenting and complementing the overall experience of visiting the exhibition, also offering the means for creating a personalized digital souvenir (a coin with the user's head engraved on it), working as a post-visit link to the exhibition and to related information, as well as an artifact to share with friends and the social media. In this paper the requirements and preferences upon which the creation of COIN-O-RAMA was based are presented, followed by an account of the conceptual and interaction / user interface design of the system. Subsequently, a technical description of the process followed to achieve the engraving effect used for creating the personalized digital coin is offered. Then, the results of an expert evaluation of a fully working prototype of the system are reported, comprising issues raised by the evaluators and the corresponding re-design of the system. The paper wraps up with some conclusions and pointers to future work.

The emergence of Intelligent Classrooms and in particular classrooms that are equipped with appropriate infrastructure for identifying the students’ attention levels, has raised the need for appropriate educator-friendly tools that facilitate monitoring and management of these educational environments. This paper presents two such systems: LECTORviewer and NotifEye. LECTORviewer is deployed on the educator’s personal workstation and offers an overview of the students’ attention levels. Additionally, through its intuitive user interface, educators can provide their input regarding ambiguous behaviors or scheduled interventions that aim to reengage distracted, tired or unmotivated students to the educational process. NotifEye is a smart watch application for educators that aims to communicate, in a mobile fashion, important events occurring during a lesson (e.g., 60% of students are tired). This work presents the functionality of these tools and the usability findings of a heuristic evaluation experiment conducted with UX experts for LECTORviewer.

This paper describes an educational game that aims to familiarize cognitive impaired children with household objects, the overall home environment and the daily activities that take place in it. In addition to touch-based interaction, the game supports physical manipulation through printed cards on a tabletop setup, using a webcam to detect and track the cards placed on the game board.

This paper presents a user experience study of interaction with printed maps for providing digitally augmented tourism information. The Interactive Maps system has been implemented based on an interactive printed matter framework which provides all the necessary components for developing smart applications that offer printed matter interaction, and has been deployed and evaluated in the context of the publicly available Tourism InfoPoint of the Municipality of Heraklion. The results of the evaluation highlight that interacting with digitally augmented paper is quite easy and natural, while the overall user experience is positive.

This paper presents LECTOR, a system that helps educators in understanding when students have stopped paying attention to the educational process and assists them in reengaging the students to the current learning activity. LECTOR aims to take advantage of the ambient facilities that “smart classrooms” have to offer by (i) enabling educators to employ their preferred attention monitoring strategies (including any well-established activity recognition techniques) in order to identify inattentive behaviors and (ii) recommending interventions for motivating distracted students when deemed necessary. Furthermore, LECTOR offers an educator friendly design studio that enables teachers to create or modify the rules that trigger “inattention alarms”, as well as tailor the intervention mechanism to the needs of their course by modifying the respective rules. This paper presents the rationale behind the design of LECTOR and outlines its key features and facilities.

It is almost inevitable that during a course, students will get distracted either by internal or external stimuli. Introducing engaging activities into the main lecture and changing pedagogies within a class period has remarkable effects on students' concentration levels. This paper presents LECTORstudio, an authoring tool that enables educators to build the logic that guides the decision-making mechanisms of LECTOR, a framework capable of identifying inattentive behaviors and intervening to re-engage students to the educational process. LECTORstudio offers three simple and intuitive wizards that aim to guide educators through the sophisticated processes of (i) defining rules that signify inattention and (ii) describing the intervention strategies that should be applied under various educational circumstances. This work presents the functionality of the tool and the usability findings of a heuristic evaluation experiment conducted with UX experts.