Youtopia is a hybrid tangible and multi-touch land use planning activity for elementary school aged children. It was implemented on a Microsoft Pixelsense digital tabletop. The main method of interaction is through physical stamp objects that children use to "stamp" different land use types onto an interactive map. Youtopia was developed to investigate issues surrounding how to design and evaluate children's collaborative learning applications using digital tabletops. In particular we are looking at how the interface design supports in depth discussion and negotiation between pairs of children around issues in sustainable development. Our primary concern is to investigate questions about codependent access points, which may enable positive interdependence among children. Codependent access points are characteristics that enable two or more children to participate and interact together. In Youtopia these implemented through sequences of stamps that are required for successful interaction, which can be assigned to children (codependent mode) or remain unassigned (independent mode).

This paper describes the premise and development of Time-Me, a tool in progress that aims to help young children better understand the concept of time. Current tools for teaching time to children mainly focus on reading it correctly on a clock. While these tools do help children begin to understand how to measure time, they do not fully help children understand the intrinsic value of time. Therefore, there may be a disconnect between reading time and understanding what is being read -the passage, or duration, of time. The design team found this as an opportunity to address a gap between reading time and understanding time.Time-Me is a proposal that aims to bridge these seemingly separate elements together for young children and provide a way to help them develop a cohesive understanding of temporal spaces. Time-Me is currently a prototype that uses tangible elements to represent time duration in connection with daily activities. Through its tangible approach, the tool aims to help children contextualize and internalize time based on the activities they partake in throughout the day that are familiar to them.Interviews and walkthroughs with children, parents, and teachers helped inform the prototype to its current stage. Through input from these groups, we were able to incorporate design elements that can help push further development of the prototype, and be applied in home, daycare, and classroom environments.

Thyroid carcinoma is the most common cancer of the endocrine system, accounting for 12% of all cancer cases in adolescents in the United States. Radioiodine therapy plays a key role in differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) treatment. This double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was aimed at evaluating the effect of probiotics supplementation in reducing the acute side-effects of radioiodine therapy in PTC patients. Fifty-six patients were randomly divided into four groups: one placebo and three intervention groups. The probiotics product used in this study was LactoCare (ZistTakhmir Co., Iran), a multi-strain commercially available symbiotic containing 12 strains of probiotic species including Lactobacillus strains, Bifidobacteria strains, and Streptococcus thermophilus, plus Fructo-oligosaccharides as the prebiotic. Group 0 was our placebo group (no probiotics), while the other three groups received probiotics capsules for 2/4 days, starting only 2 days prior to radioiodine therapy, only 4 days after radioiodine therapy or 2 days prior and 4 days after radioiodine therapy. Six patients were withdrawn during the study because of poor compliance or at their own request. The symptoms reported by patients including data about the incidence and duration of each complication were recorded. The probiotics' effectiveness was confirmed for dry mouth and taste loss or change when it was administered prior to the radioiodine treatment. The benefit was not confirmed for other radiation-induced complications such as pain and swelling in the neck, nausea and vomiting, salivary gland swelling, and diarrhea. Further large-scale clinical trials are warranted to improve our knowledge in this quickly evolving field.