Children with autism have specific difficulties understanding complex mental states like thought, belief, and false belief and their effects on behaviour. Such children benefit from focused teaching, where beliefs are likened to photographs-in-the-head. Here two studies, one with seven participants and one with 10, tested a picturein-the-head strategy for dealing with thoughts and behaviour by teaching children with autism about cartoon thought-bubbles as a device for representing such mental states. This prosthetic device led children with autism to pass not only false belief tests, but also related theory of mind tests. These results confirm earlier findings of the efficacy of picture-in-the-head teaching about mental states, but go further in showing that thought-bubble training more easily extends to children's understanding of thoughts (not just behaviour) and to enhanced performance on several transfer tasks. Thought-bubbles provide a theoretically interesting as well as an especially easy and effective teaching technique.

In this paper we describe a technique of CurriculumFocused Design, and the aspects of our research experience on which the technique is based. Our technique is a variant of Druin's Cooperative Inquiry. Cooperative Inquiry is a well-developed design practice for children, but it has been practised largely outside the classroom. Druin's technique has also been developed in American schools, which have greater curriculum flexibility than English schools, which are highly curriculum-focused. We studied the English curriculum and identified an area that we believed could fruitfully be augmented by technology. Our design approach was novel insofar as our evaluation sessions doubled as lessons for students. Our interdisciplinary design team, including a former teacher with over 10 years' classroom experience, evaluated the interface in a classroom setting, providing strong environmental validity to the design process.

Abstract. We discuss domestic appliance use based on an ethnographic study of 9 households. Specifically, we look at which domestic appliances users choose to 'program', and break them into two categories for analysis; those that allow users to program actions at future times, and those that allow for macro creation to make repeated tasks easier. We also look at domestic programming habits based on gender.

Most information retrieval (IR) interfaces are designed for a single user working with a dedicated interface. We present a system in which the IR interface has been fully integrated into a collaborative context of discussion or debate relating to the query topic. By using a tangible user interface, we support multiple users interacting simultaneously to refine the query. Integration with more powerful back-end query processing is still in progress, but we have already been able to evaluate the prototype interface in a real context of use, and confirmed that it can improve relevance rankings compared to single-user dedicated search engines such as Google.

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