STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

Please note the following dates!

Event	Deadline
Submission Deadline (EXTENDED)	November 10, 2022 AoE December 1, 2022 AoE
Notification Deadline (EXTENDED)	November 25, 2022 AoE December 8, 2022 AoE
Camera-ready deadline (EXTENDED)	December 9, 2022 AoE December 15, 2022 AoE
TEI 2023 conference	February 26 - March 1, 2023 AoE

Tangible Social Classroom Experiences

After a long time of restrictions due to the global pandemic, institutions around the world are opening up for in-person working, meeting, teaching and research again. Work from home orders are being lifted and there is an increase in in-person contacts again.

How will this transition change our lives? It is almost certain that we will not go back to the old “normal” we used to know prior to the pandemic. While going back to in-person might be very welcomed by some at may also cause feelings of insecurity, helplessness and anxiety for others. Additional means of bringing social interaction back, be it in-person, hybrid or fully remote, will remain a research field to stay. Best we start exploring now. This year’s edition of the Student Design Competition is looking ideas for tangible, embedded and/or embodied artifacts that foster the social experience of learning together at classroom level. We look forward to beautiful designs, speculative futures and thought-provoking ideas!

For the Student Design Challenge (SDC), we invite students to contribute by submitting a vision video and, and if elected a physical prototype which will be exhibited at the TEI conference. We do not expect to receive fully functional prototypes, but rather probes, mock-ups, videos and/or scenarios of machines that go beyond what we can build right now. We expect to see how the proposed artifacts (or organisms/systems…) will be used, and in what context as well as a short list of technical/social “breakthroughs” that would have to happen for this to become mainstream (or a strong argument why this should happen yesterday rather than tomorrow). The high-level goal is to provoke discussion and speculation as to how we can design that future.

Accepted TEI 2023 Student Design Challenge submissions will become a physical part of an exhibition we will run at the in-person part of the TEI conference. We will record a video in which we go through the exhibition, overlaid with quotes and speculations by the authors so as to make the exhibition accessible to virtual attendees too. The purpose of this video is to trigger discussion and further design iteration. During the conference we will host a virtual panel session in which we give out the awards and where the authors exchange thoughts around their visions, the audience can participate to design a powerful future together. Accepted papers will be published in the TEI2023 proceedings, part of the ACM Digital Library.

Submissions will further be made accessible online in the form of a virtual guided tour with statements of the authors

The jury will award three prizes : best mechanical prototype, most innovative vision, and best motivated scenario. The jury will further prepare a Jury Statement for all accepted submissions.

GENERAL INFORMATION:

SOCIAL CLASSROOM EXPERIENCES

Learning is an activity that we persists through our lifetime. New impressions leave traces in our brains and minds. Oftentimes we specifically attend classes to learn something new or refresh past experiences. Before the pandemic, a lot of these classes were conducted in person in classroom settings. As we return to classroom experiences, not all may be able or willing to return to an in-person scenario. Hybrid settings are becoming the new normal, posing huge challenges.

How will we create an experience that is inviting, inclusive and accessible for more persons than the classic in-person experience we were used to? How do we include everyone in the conversation, regardless if they are attending remotely or on-site?

As TEI-community we also ask ourselves, how will we make these experiences more tangible? What is beyond the desktop and the video-conference apps? How do we make things tangible across a distance for remote attendees?

These are just some of the dimensions of the design challenge. We are sure there are many more we are overlooking right now. A good submission ideally tackles one such challenge (not limited to what we wrote here, we highly encourage exploring other dimensions!) or a combination of different challenges and paints a picture of how this will develop in the upcoming decade(s).

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

This year’s TEI Student Design Challenge will take the form of design of the social experience of learning together at classroom level. Students submit a demonstration video and a document with rationale/motivation for their particular vision.

Submissions will be selected by a jury and should include all author names, affiliations and contact information, and are thus not anonymous.

Upon acceptance, we invite students to send a physical demonstration model which will be exhibited at the in-person part of the conference. We will produce a “guided tour video” through this exhibition and host a virtual panel discussion on the topic with authors and the audience at the conference.

Format Requirements

TEI2023 uses the new ACM workflow for submission templates and published papers. This requires the use of a simplified one-column template for submission, while the final two-column paper has to be rendered for publication after acceptance. For further details please follow the provided instructions or contact our Publication Chairs.

For the Student Design Challenge, you will have to submit an up to 4-pages long paper in the simplified one-column template (excluding references), a high-resolution image, and a video. You will also have to commit to producing an exhibition piece for the in-person conference which we can prepare on-site and attend the panel discussion.

The paper should clearly describe the submitted vision and give a rationale for the decisions that lead to this vision. You should also include a photo of the exhibition piece. The remaining space should be used to contextualize the vision and discuss elements like what technology would have to be developed to unlock this future.

The acknowledgements section should indicate whether any assistance was drawn from outside the student team (e.g., from advisors, faculty, domain experts, existing solutions, users, etc.).

We will showcase the visions at an exhibition in the live-conference and will record a guided tour through this exhibition for virtual attendance. You therefore have to commit to produce an exhibition piece and instructions for us how to build it up in case you cannot be present in-person. This exhibition and the related tour will serve as a platform for conversation during the conference and beyond.

If you have specific quotes you want to have in the video, please highlight these in the submission document.

The video length should be maximum 5 minutes. The video should demonstrate your vision and ideally use the exhibition piece to illustrate this: how, where, by whom is it used? How is it made? You are free to upload the video on other channels for publicity.

Submissions should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time. You might perhaps also be submitting your project to other TEI formats such as the WIP or Demos. This is allowed, but you will still need to produce and submit a tailored submission and video for the SDC and attend the panel discussion. The different kinds of conference submission will be reviewed and handled independently.

Selection Process

Submission will be reviewed and selected by the SDC Chairs and a jury of selected academic and professional design experts. The submissions should include all author names, affiliations and contact information, and are thus not anonymous. Confidentiality of submissions will be maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity.

Material to Submit Upon Acceptance

Authors of accepted submissions will be notified on November 15th. Accepted submissions should be finalized by preparing the camera-ready revisions of the paper and submitted by November 22nd You have until January 31th to make and ship the exhibition piece, it should arrive in Poland by that time, please leave time for shipping.

At the Conference

During the TEI conference, there will be the in-person exhibition and the virtual guided tour with quotes form the authors on permanent exhibit. There will be a 1-hour panel session with the chosen candidates, ideally members of the jury and the chairs in which we discuss and brainstorm about the different visions. (Virtual) Attendees of TEI are welcome to attend/join in.**

Attendance

At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference before the early registration deadline in order for the final paper to be published in the conference proceedings and the exhibit to be shown at the conference.

Submission Process

All work except the exhibition piece itself must be submitted through the Precision Conference submission system (PCS). The submission system will open in July 2022.