F. Conference paper
Assigned Week 8 (March 26). Due Week 14 (May 7).Your culminating writing assignment for the course is a short paper (~4 pages, depending on conference requirements) suitable for submission to an academic conference such as ISLS Annual Meeting, Interaction Design and Children, ACM SIGCSE, ACM CHI, ISTE, CSTA, MozFest, the Web Conference, Fablearn, or ITiCSE. Here is a list of more potentially-relevant conferences. You may also propose a different venue so long as you are writing for some authentic audience. The criteria for your final paper are defined by that venue's submission requirements. Typically, papers of the expected length will be submitted as Notes, Short Papers, Work-in-Progress Papers, or Posters.
Here are some examples. Many are student final projects from Beyond Bits and Atoms, a course Dr. Proctor co-taught with his advisor, Dr. Paulo Blikstein, at Stanford and at Columbia Teachers College.
Proctor, C. & Blikstein, P. (2017 , June). Interactive fiction: Weaving together literacies of text and code. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 555–560). ACM. doi:10.1145/3078072.3084324
Campos, F., Blikstein, P., & Azhar, A. (2017 , June). The Conference of the Birds: A Collaborative Storytelling Environment for Literacy Development. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 729–732). ACM. doi:10.1145/3078072.3091991
Kralicek, D., Shelar, S., von Rabenau, L., & Blikstein, P. (2018 , June). Inside out: teaching empathy and social-emotional skills. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 525–528). ACM. doi:10.1145/3202185.3213525
Mongkhonvanit, K., Zau, C. J. Y., Proctor, C., & Blikstein, P. (2018). Testudinata: A tangible interface for exploring functional programming. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 493–496). ACM. doi:10.1145/3202185.3210762
Boles, K. L., Macedo, L., Proctor, C., & Blikstein, P. (2018). Manipul8: An interactive experience to inspire pattern-based algebraic thinking and representational fluency. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 501–504). ACM. doi:10.1145/3202185.3210763
Publishing your research
You will prepare a paper you could submit to a conference, but there is no requirement that you actually do so. If you would like to submit your work to the conference, keep in mind the following:
- Discuss your plans with Dr. Proctor well in advance. Don't underestimate how much work goes into preparing an academic publication.
- Generalizable research involving human subjects must be conducted within the scope of an IRB protocol. Therefore, you must either (a) conduct a project which is part of an ongoing research project with an existing IRB protocol; (b) submit an IRB protocol for your project (beyond the scope of this course; requires substantial advance planning) or (c) focus your paper on the technology you have designed, not on interactions with its users.
- In general, it does not work well to enter the class with a fixed idea for your final project and it is unfair to your group to insist on a particular project because of external constraints. As always, open, early communication with your group is essential.
- Attending premier conferences is expensive but also potentially important for careers in academia or in industry research. There are many potential sources of funding for conference participation; start planning early.
- Discuss with your group how authorship credit will be assigned.