Casey R Hickerson

Cognitive tutors, a family of intelligent tutoring systems based on the ACT-R theory of cognition, help students to learn by providing step-by-step hints and feedback messages as the students solve real problems. Such systems have been shown to improve learning in many contexts and have been adopted by many schools and school systems.

With support from the Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education, we built a website that provides free, individualized mathematics instruction for middle-school students using tutors built with Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

The first version of the site primarily supports after-school tutoring programs in which students are guided by a human tutor. Later versions will use cognitive modeling to select exercises that meet students' individual needs without a tutor's guidance. We anticipate that site will be useful in a broad range of contexts: classroom instruction, extracurricular tutoring, supplemental and remedial instruction, homework and home schooling.

My primary responsibilities as lead interaction designer included: performing background research and conducting precedent studies to refine the project's scope; generating prototypes, use cases and scenarios to identify functional and technical requirements; working with experienced teachers, math coaches and other domain experts to improve users' experience; organizing the site's information architecture; and designing the site's overall look and feel.

Principal Investigators: Vincent Aleven and Bruce McLaren
Laboratory: Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education
Online: mathtutor.web.cmu.edu

Onveloop Video Sketch (12 MB)

Visions of the future from years gone by invariably featured the use of video phones in lieu of telephones. Although the technology needed for video communication is now ubiquitous, that particular vision remains elusive. The goal of this project was to examine the social and technological factors involved in video communication to create a viable web-based video messaging application.

During initial user research, our team chose to focus on college students and young professionals as our primary audience since these groups are most likely to meet the minimal requirements for expertise and technology. After identifying our audience, we surveyed potential users to discover how they currently use technology to communicate. From their responses, we identified recurring concerns that influence interaction with a video comunication system and we identified the contexts in which video communication would be most welcome. At the conclusion of initial user research, we established the mission for this project, to "enable easy creation of video to enhance communication in established personal relationships by emphasizing message quality within specific contexts."

We subsequently explored three concepts for this application: video messaging as a love letter, video messaging as a scrapbook and video messaging as a campfire story (group storytelling). Feedback from users identified the first concept as the strongest, so chose it for further refinement. After documenting the information architecture of the system, developing wireframes, and conducting an additional round of evaluative testing, we produced a working prototype of the application with Adobe's FLEX technology.

Course: 05-855/51-725 Basic Interaction
Instructor: Shelley Evenson
Team: Casey Hickerson, Wiebke Poerschke, Edmundo Ruiz, Kyle Vice, Jackie Weber
Completed: Fall 2007