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Due to the applied nature of statistics and data science, many educators in these fields recognize the need to teach their students how to be effective interdisciplinary collaborators. Some prior research considers different approaches to teaching interdisciplinary collaboration skills. However, missing from this literature are the connections between teaching collaboration and education theory. Thus, there is a lack of understanding about why the various pedagogical approaches may be effective. In this descriptive study, we describe an approach to teaching interdisciplinary collaboration using a Community of Practice (CoP) and highlight connections between potentially reproducible elements of this approach and education theory that explains why this approach may be effective from the perspectives of both education and collaboration theory. Our results show that students and content-area experts recognize this approach to teaching statistical and data science collaboration to be effective. By grounding our methods for teaching statistics and data science collaboration skills in education theory, we focus attention on which aspects can be replicated in other contexts, why they work well, and how they can be improved. We recommend instructors intentionally create a CoP within their courses, encourage peer mentorship, and emphasize a growth mindset.
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The Cane Game: An Educational Tool for Orientation and Mobility
Proficiency in Orientation and Mobility (O&M) is vital for people who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) to access physical environments and economic opportunities. While much engineering effort has focused on using technology to augment the practice of using a mobility cane, there is comparatively little work on using technology in service of teaching the use of the cane itself. We report a case study of a multi-year collaboration between assistive technology researchers and a certified O&M instructor at Perkins School for the Blind to utilize technology to create O&M teaching tools that use the concept of gamification to make such training more fun and effective. In this collaboration we adopted an action research approach, and through the application of action research HCI methods created several prototype systems for teaching O&M skills. These prototypes were refined to create the Cane Game: a system for teaching students cane sweeping technique using interactive music and sound. The Cane Game system can be constructed for less than $100 and is capable of being distributed at large-scale. A qualitative study of Perkins students' O&M educational trajectories while using the system illuminates the conditions in which this tool is effective as a teaching aid.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2007824
- PAR ID:
- 10465780
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3573859
