In this article, we present a new direction for the role of Making for children. Beyond the use of Making to teach specific STEM concepts as is common in prior work, we propose that Making activities should be designed with the focus of instilling a Maker mindset in children. Our target is elementary-school-level children aged 8 to 11. We present an approach that conceptualizes Making as a 'Means-to-an-Ends' to nurture a Maker mindset and identity in children. The approach was embodied in a carefully-designed storytelling Making kit called the Maker Theater, and two Maker workshops for children in the target age range. Our analysis goal in this article was to investigate how the potential for a Maker mindset/identity formation may be manifested in children's attitudes and behaviors. Guided by a theoretical framework of three key determinants of the Maker mindset (self-efficacy, motivation and interest), we analyzed workshop data using qualitative coding methods to derive thematic indicators. We discuss our contributions and the value of our findings for the child-computer interaction community.

Every hour, nearly 40 people under the age of 25 die in road accidents around the world. According to the World Health Organization, this is the second most important cause of death for 5‐ to 29‐year‐olds. In India, drunk driving and inefficient law enforcements are major contributing factors. The current system of visual identification of traffic violation, conducted by the traffic authorities, cannot work everywhere and every time. There is a great demand for simple and cost‐effective solutions to traffic safety problem. In this paper, we propose a traffic violation detection technique for vehicular ad hoc networks to detect crossing speed limits and analyzing the behavior of driver. In this work, we used a sensor device, a digital map and GPS‐based system for area of 1000 m × 1000 m. We analyzed the behavior of each vehicle in the network. Here, we have divided a network into a number of clusters, and each cluster has an infrastructure node (base station); the infrastructure node will be the point of contact for all the vehicles in that area. All infrastructure nodes communicate with a control center (master control room). If the driver violates traffic rule(s), then the infrastructure node will send an alert message to the control center. We have simulated our proposed model on a graphics package, and the simulation result suggests that drunken drivers can no longer escape from the law enforcers, which is the foundation for traffic safety. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

No abstract

Animated stories are challenging to produce for the novice adult, let alone for children. Research into how to facilitate the creation of animations for children is an ongoing effort. In this paper, we propose the concept of performative authoring which taps into the power of children's pretend play to allow them to create animations through body enactments. We review the literature on animation authoring systems focusing on children, propose the new concept of performative authoring that uses enactment as a mode of story authoring, and describe the design of DiME, an exemplar system embodying performative authoring. We report on a pilot study that was conducted with the system.

At around age nine when social awareness and selfevaluation heighten, children experience a precipitous slump in creative engagement. We propose an enactment-based approach grounded in embodied cognition theories to support children's creative self-efficacy and creative thinking in storytelling during the period of this slump. Our investigation of the approach with 20 children indicated that enactment-based animated authoring improves children's sense of self-efficacy in creating stories, particularly for children with low to medium extraversion, and enables children to produce richer stories, especially for children who scored low on the baseline creativity test.