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CHEESEHub is a web-accessible, public science gateway that hosts containerized, hands-on demonstrations of cybersecurity concepts. There are now a plethora of services and tools designed to simplify modern gateway deployment and configuration such as commercial and academic composable cloud, the Terraform infrastructure as service tool, Kubernetes and Helm for container orchestration, as well as CILogon for simplified user authentication. Despite leveraging these tools, our day-to-day experience with deploying, upgrading, scaling, and extending CHEESEHub has not been entirely straightforward. We describe here some of the major challenges we have encountered in managing CHEESEHub and developing web-accessible demonstrations for the last five years. We hope this will help both new and seasoned gateway developers to effectively leverage these modern tools while avoiding these same pitfalls, while also providing starting points for discussions about gateway development and deployment best-practices. 

A joint project of design-based educational researchers, mechatronic engineers, and digital accessibility experts has created a new genre of pedagogical technologies — hybrid material–digital multimodal artifacts for collaborative learning of sensorily diverse students in inclusive classrooms. Here we present the Quad, a manipulable quadrilateral hand-held object that is linked in real time to its digital screen-based simulation, whose own transformation, in turn, activates content-oriented voice description and output sonification. Pilot studies with blind and visually-impaired student-participants suggest the Quad’s potential in grounding geometric reasoning, insight, and generalization in exploratory haptic–proprioceptive investigation. In its conception and development, the Quad exemplifies the ethical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives of its collaborating designers respecting all children’s universal right to access and participate in cultural practices, including techno–scientific activities. As researchers, we harness technological innovations to realize moral obligations and, through that, to promote the study of human perception, action, and cognition. We look forward to mutual growth of our research program along with parallel efforts advancing an Italian project to promote teachers’ pre-service training and professional development surrounding implications of the embodiment turn in the cognitive sciences for school-based instructional practice. 

Over the last decade, extensive growth in digital educational content has opened up new opportunities for teaching and learning. Despite such advancements, digital learning experiences often omit one ofour richest and earliest learning modalities - touch. This lack of haptic (touch) interaction creates a growing gap in supporting inclusive, embodied learning experiences digitally. Our research centers on the development ofinclusive learning tools that can flexibly adapt for use in different learning contexts to support learners with a wide range of needs, co-designed with students with disabilities. In this paper, we focus on the development of a tangible device for geometry learning - the Tangible Manipulative for Quadrilaterals (TMQ). We detail the design evolution of the TMQ and present two user studies investigating the affordances o ft h eI M and the user strategies employed when explored in isolation and in tandem with a two-dimensional touchscreen-based rendering ofa quadrilateral. Findings illustrate the affordances of the I M Oo v e r traditional, static media and its ability to serve as an inclusive geometry learning tool. 

Context. The ESA Gaia mission provides a unique time-domain survey for more than 1.6 billion sources with G ≲ 21 mag. Aims. We showcase stellar variability in the Galactic colour-absolute magnitude diagram (CaMD). We focus on pulsating, eruptive, and cataclysmic variables, as well as on stars that exhibit variability that is due to rotation and eclipses. Methods. We describe the locations of variable star classes, variable object fractions, and typical variability amplitudes throughout the CaMD and show how variability-related changes in colour and brightness induce “motions”. To do this, we use 22 months of calibrated photometric, spectro-photometric, and astrometric Gaia data of stars with a significant parallax. To ensure that a large variety of variable star classes populate the CaMD, we crossmatched Gaia sources with known variable stars. We also used the statistics and variability detection modules of the Gaia variability pipeline. Corrections for interstellar extinction are not implemented in this article. Results. Gaia enables the first investigation of Galactic variable star populations in the CaMD on a similar, if not larger, scale as was previously done in the Magellanic Clouds. Although the observed colours are not corrected for reddening, distinct regions are visible in which variable stars occur. We determine variable star fractions to within the current detection thresholds of Gaia . Finally, we report the most complete description of variability-induced motion within the CaMD to date. Conclusions. Gaia enables novel insights into variability phenomena for an unprecedented number of stars, which will benefit the understanding of stellar astrophysics. The CaMD of Galactic variable stars provides crucial information on physical origins of variability in a way that has previously only been accessible for Galactic star clusters or external galaxies. Future Gaia data releases will enable significant improvements over this preview by providing longer time series, more accurate astrometry, and additional data types (time series BP and RP spectra, RVS spectra, and radial velocities), all for much larger samples of stars.