Hard hard user interfaces.

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Started as someone doing ActionScript in Macromedia Flash I got into Human-Computer-Interaction after watching Jeff's Hann's multi-touch work. That's the power of a really cool demo that inspired the birth of NUIGroup community which spawned 1000s of makers all around the world making their own projector camera multitouch systems. All of it became mainstream once Apple released the iPhone to the world, and also gave birth to my interest in human-centered engineering. I spent some 10 years after that playing with sensors, haptics, and gestural interfaces through multiple input modalities but nothing stuck as much as multi-touch did. Thanks to Apple's execution. Everyone's phone/tablet interaction is default multitouch. (unless you have a visual impairment). Primsense evolved into Kinect, then came Wiimote, Leap but nothing stuck.  for speech, it was Amazon's Alexa. Latest news , that its going to lose Amazon 10B.  Like I am writing this post through my keyboard a...
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Scratch Mini Bootcamp

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So the scratch bootcamp turned out to be fun during my 14 day break from regular research. We traveled 3 cities, 4 schools, and introduced Scratch Programming environment to 8-12 year old kids. Most kids were first time introduced to programming. The novel drag and drop based looping and the fact that other kids from around the world could re-mix, check out their projects,  excited them into coming up with their own ideas, and build them into something usable. The projects involved animations, adding interactivity, and using sprites. Tapan Sharma(student of class 3rd) volunteered and shared some of the projects online.

I am highly confident of Scratch as a learning tool, and its induction in our education system, due to its learning-by-doing approach.

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