One of the myths of Agile Development is that selforganizing teams do not need direction. The agile development movement focuses primarily on programmers – programmers should do X, Y and Z, and everyone else should do whatever it takes to support the programmers. A fantastic start, since programmers are the people who actually build the organization’s product; however, few techniques are offere...

In this paper, we focus on a unique solid, named a “sphericon”, which has geometric properties that cause it to roll down a slope while swinging from side to side. We propose an interactive system for designing 3D objects with the same geometric characteristics as a sphericon. For high system efficiency, we used a conical voxel representation for defining these objects. The system allows the us...

This paper describes our work on a computational tool for the design of mechanical elements suitable for use in automata (mechanical toys and sculpture). The purpose of the tool is to permit students to create customized mechanical components (such as cams); to combine and simulate sets of components; and to "print out" the components on devices such as laser cutters that realize the designs in...

The Augmented Knight’s Castle is an augmented toy environment that enriches the children’s pretend play by using background music, sound effects, verbal commentary of toys, and different forms of tactile and visual feedback in reaction to the children’s play. Moreover, interactive learning experiences can be integrated into the play (e.g. to teach songs and poems or to provide the child with fa...

Reading comprehension, much like comprehension of situations and comprehension of oral language, is embodied. In all cases, comprehension is the ability to take effective action on the basis of affordances related to the body, the physical world, and personal goals and cultural norms. In language contexts, action-based comprehension arises from simulating the linguistic content using neural and...

Non-visual senses can be used in toys to enhance and enrich the play experience. Previous research has shown that – especially for young children developing sensory-motor skills – exploration and play are two tightly linked activities: everything is new and needs to be “studied”, and playful behaviors emerge from active exploration. The main idea of this paper is to provide a new approach in de...

The optimization of Brain Computer Interface systems is of great importance for the purpose of making them more usable and adjustable according to the needs of the end users. However, when evaluating their performances, it is evident the lack of a standard metric and of a common way to describe or represent the behavior, characteristics and data relative to the functional modules that compose t...