Within the Child-Computer Interaction community fun and learning have been a prominent, recurring theme. However, despite the general interest, fun is often handled as a commonsense notion, without a commonly accepted definition, underlying theoretical framework and ways of measurements. Without these, both researching, designing for, implementing, and evaluating fun elements in learning activities are challenging, and can result in contradicting findings. This workshop aims to address these issues by bringing together participants from different disciplines with various backgrounds who has an interest and experience in the topic of fun in learning.

This study explores the factors that influence experts’ regular contribution to educational community question-answering (CQA) platforms. Providing answers is essential for sharing knowledge on CQA platforms, but it also affects learners’ progressive inquiry. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop and test a theoretical model that aims to explain which factors influence whether experts answer questions on educational CQA platforms and how these factors correlate with each other to form a “map” of experts’ respective behavior. We examined experts’ perceptions of three dimensions: the CQA platform’s usability, the quality of questions asked, and the added value of answering these questions. We examined the factors involved in these dimensions from the perspective of the Theory of Planned Behavior to connect them with the experts’ perceptions, intentions, and actions on a CQA platform. As our case study, we took the 100mentors web and mobile app, a small-scale platform that addresses learning communities around the world, and we conducted a survey for their registered experts (N=126). The factorial structure indicated that experts first perceived the question quality mostly based on its relevance to their expertise or experience (question quality); secondly, that their intention to answer was mainly set by their motives to make a difference for the learner and partially by the user-friendliness of the platform (added value of answering and CQA platform’s usability); and finally, that their actions were connected to the regular use of the platform for answer-sharing (CQA platform’s usability). A future research challenge is to test the factorial structure in large-scale educational CQA platforms. The further confirmation of the expert behavior pattern can have a practical implication for the platforms to guide their expert community more efficiently and for the learners to pursue their learning through progressive inquiry.

A fast-paced hands-on workshop introducing the concept and practice of Thinkpetizers. The workshop presents the underlying philosophy and a 'recipe' for successfully creating Thinkpetizers, along with how they used as building blocks for creating multi-hour workshops, sessions and events. The Thinkpetizers support the step that precedes (digital and analogue) fabrication, i.e., coming up with creative and innovative ideas. They can also be used for refreshing one's mind and creative powers throughout the whole creation process. Furthermore, they can be used in a classroom setting as a means for triggering (creative) thinking and setting the mood for conducting any type of activity, but also as an engaging way for approaching any learning subject. The workshop is targeted to anyone interested in supporting creative thinking in a formal/non-formal/ informal learning environment. Participants will experience a design philosophy, as well as, a series of practical activities and will have a lot of FUN!.

This paper addresses for the first time a large body of archaeobotanical data from prehistoric Southeastern Europe, mostly published for the first time, that correspond to cereal food preparations. The evidence presented here comes from 20 sites situated in Greece and Bulgaria, spanning the Early Neolithic through to the Iron Age (7th millennium B.C.-1st millennium B.C.). The remains correspond to cereal fragments or agglomerations of fragments that resulted from ancient food preparation steps such as grinding, boiling, sprouting/malting, mixing in bread-like or porridge-like foodstuffs. The article builds on previous pilot studies and with the aid of stereomicroscopy and scanning electron microscopy offers a first classification and possible interpretations of the finds leading to the recipes that might have generated them. At the same time the article highlights the significance of retrieving and studying in depth such rare archaeobotanical finds, points out the interpretative problems stemming from such material and suggests ways forward to address similar archaeological finds in different parts of the world. The paper demonstrates the potential of the systematic study of cereal-based food remains, in our case prehistoric Southeastern Europe, to reveal a wide variability in cereal food transformation practices, suggestive of the interplay between available ingredients, cultural traditions and the complex interaction between society and environment.

‘Future Designers’ is an interactive and participative crash course that aims to introduce to children the concepts and practice of creativity, design, and design thinking. The course targets multiple learning styles and intelligences, combining various learning approaches and tools, including lecturing (using a variety of media such as images, videos and music), creative question & answer, constructive – personal and collaborative – hands-on activities, play, humor and fun. The full course lasts 4–5 h and can be delivered in a single or two sessions. This paper reports five pilot studies of the course, conducted over one year period with the objective of assessing the feasibility of the course and the attendees’ satisfaction, as well as obtaining feedback. The pilots took place as follows: in-house with 8 primary school teachers, 4 post graduate students and 2 children; in a real classroom with 22 children 10–12 years old; in a classroom environment with 25 primary school teachers assuming the role of children; in a school environment with 20 children 10–11 years old and their parents, as well as in a school environment with 27 older children (12–15 years old). The outcomes stemming from all pilots are very promising and indicate that ‘Future Designers’ is an engaging and fun experience for people of diverse ages, which can fruitfully engage children (but also adults) in creative activities, and can generate interesting design ideas.

The Tourism Office of the city of Heraklion is a truly original facility that provides visitors with novel ways to access information through the use of modern technologies and innovative interactive systems developed by ICS-FORTH. This paper presents the innovative technologies employed at the tourist information office in order to enhance the information provision capacity of this type of facility in conjunction with traditional approaches, such as printed information material and human operated information provision. The info-point of Heraklion deploys a mixture of systems that augment the visiting experience while providing information through kinaesthetic interaction, Mixed Reality and play.

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.

This paper presents an Ambient Intelligence infrastructure that fuses state-of-the-art technologies and related applications with digital cultural resources to deliver interactive and immersive user encounters through on-site Virtual Exhibitions (VEs) which respond to the demands of 'new museology'. The practical exploitation of the concept is presented through the reformation of the exhibition spaces of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion which is one of the most important Greek museums hosting representative artefacts from all the periods of Cretan prehistory and ancient history, covering a chronological span of over 5,500 years from the Neolithic period to Roman times.

This work regards fingertip contact detection and localization upon planar surfaces, for the purpose of providing interactivity in augmented, interactive displays that are implemented upon these surfaces. The proposed approach differs from the widely employed approach where user hands are observed from above, in that user hands are imaged laterally. An algorithmic approach for the treatment of the corresponding visual input is proposed. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated and compared to the top view approach. Advantages of the proposed approach include increased sensitivity, localization accuracy, scalability, as well as, practicality and cost efficiency of installation.

This paper presents a digital catalogue interactive system for promoting cultural heritage and tourism information in public spaces, which employs the notions of playful and tangible interaction. The system features two touch screens, one for displaying high resolution images and one for providing detailed information regarding the presented artifact. Navigation in the contents of the digital catalogue is accomplished through interaction with technology-enhanced physical objects as well as touch gestures. The paper presents how the system has been adapted in terms of content and interaction and physical design to accommodate different types of information and installation contexts, namely an oil mill to present culinary information, a digital museum catalogue, a digital cultural heritage photo album, and a digital nature observatory.

The global impact of the digital revolution in the cultural sector worldwide brings about the need to ensure the accessibility of physical exhibits, interactive digital exhibits, digital media and digital content for disabled people. The paper addresses the accessibility of CH resources, and the need for a new approach to accessible user interaction with CH exhibits.

What if there was a robotic companion that comes to life the day you are born and then grows along with you? Not only in terms of size, but also as regards mental and functional capabilities, as well as, appearance. It starts as a plush toy, doubling up as a baby monitor, caretaker, tutor and entertainer, and eventually evolves to become a "teenager" android friend taking care of your everyday needs and enhancing your skills with superhero-like powers. Furthermore, as it is always around you (since "day 1"), it is your ubiquitous diary, able to recollect moments and events of your life that even you, may not remember - your first word, the names and faces of all the friends you ever made, the first time you fell in love. Wouldn't this be great? Or could it be dreadful?

A crash course on creativity, design thinking, and design for young children.

This paper reports on the design, development and evaluation of a framework which implements virtual humans for information provision. The framework can be used to create interactive multimedia information visualizations (e.g., images, text, audio, videos, 3D models) and provides a dynamic data modeling mechanism for storage and retrieval and implements communication through multimodal interaction techniques. The interaction may involve human-to-agent, agent-to-environment or agent-to-agent communication. The framework supports alternative roles for the virtual agents who may act as assistants for existing systems, standalone "applications" or even as integral parts of emerging smart environments. Finally, an evaluation study was conducted with the participation of 10 people to study the developed system in terms of usability and effectiveness, when it is employed as an assisting mechanism for another application. The evaluation results were highly positive and promising, confirming the system's usability and encouraging further research in this area.

360(2) is an interactive system that allows exploration of digital representations of real artifacts through physical and multi-touch interaction with a double rotating gimbal (i.e., a disk that the user can freely rotate around two axes). While the user manipulates the disk, the system uses a projector to augment a display upon it. User input is supported both through fingertip contact (i.e., multi-touch) and disk rotation in both axes. In addition to the disk, a secondary projection surface is provided for additional information, upon which multi-touch gestures are supported.

This paper reports on the design and implementation of BeThereNow, a public interactive information system where users are depicted immersed in various sceneries. The work is focused on the domain of info-tainment in public spaces using large displays and aims on short-time usage. The implemented system employs a mixed reality application through which users are informed about different sceneries and also create personalized digital postcards. This process is accomplished using computer vision algorithms in order to depict users and objects, while removing the background of the scene. Finally, the lessons learned from the long-term deployment of the system out-in-the-wild are presented, providing an insight on the users’ actions and reactions and feedback on future research directions.

This work regards fingertip contact detection and localization upon planar surfaces to provide interactivity in augmented displays implemented upon these surfaces, by projector-camera systems. In contrast to the widely employed approach where user hands are observed from above, lateral camera placement avails increased sensitivity to touch detection. An algorithmic approach for the treatment of the laterally acquired visual input is proposed and is comparatively evaluated against the conventional.

Despite the present abundance of approaches and information related to creative thinking, three basic human traits have been completely overlooked although that, if cautiously used, can considerably contribute to the creative process. Not coincidentally, these traits are also the ones that education has traditionally demonized and designated as its major enemies: stupidity, ignorance and nonsense. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the positive aspects of these defamed traits but also provide practical advice on how they can be used for sparking and nurturing creative thinking and innovative design.

Body-based interaction constitutes a very intuitive way for humans to communicate with their environment but also among themselves. Nowadays, various technological solutions allow for fast and robust, noninstrumented body tracking at various levels of granularity and sophistication. This chapter studies three distinct cases showcasing different representative approaches of employing body-based interaction for the creation of public systems, in two application domains: culture and marketing. The first case is a room-sized exhibit at an archeological museum, where multiple visitors concurrently interact with a large wall projection through their position in space, as well as through the path they follow. The second example is an “advergame” used as a means of enhancing the outdoor advertising campaign of a food company. In this case, players interact with the wall-projected game world through a virtual, two-dimensional shadow of their body. Finally, the third case presents a public system for exploring timelines in both two and three dimensions that supports detailed body tracking in combination with single-hand, two-hands, and leg gestures. Design considerations are provided for each case, including related benefits and shortcomings. Additionally, findings stemming from user-based evaluations and field observations on the actual use of these systems are presented, along with pointers to potential improvements and upcoming challenges.