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Sign Language is used to facilitate the communication between Deaf and non-Deaf people. It uses signs-words with basic structural elements such as handshape, parts of face, body or space, and the orientation of the fingers-palm. Sign…

Finding balanced ways to employ Large Language Models (LLMs) in education is a challenge due to inherent risks of poor understanding of the technology and of a susceptible audience. This is particularly so with younger children, who are…

Layout-sensitive grammars have been adopted in many modern programming languages. However, tool support for this kind of grammars still remains limited and immature. In this paper, we present Lay-it-out, an interactive framework for…

For decades, context-dependent phonemes have been the dominant sub-word unit for conventional acoustic modeling systems. This status quo has begun to be challenged recently by end-to-end models which seek to combine acoustic, pronunciation,…

Programming social robots is challenging for novice robot programmers due to required expertise in planning, interaction design, and programming. While large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise through code generation from…

Novice programmers need to write basic code as part of the learning process, but they often face difficulties. To assist struggling students, we recently implemented personalized Parsons problems, which are code puzzles where students…

As pervasive data collection and powerful algorithms increasingly shape children's experience of the world and each other, their ability to interrogate computational algorithms has become crucially important. A growing body of work has…

Computer science students often struggle with abstract theoretical concepts, particularly in introductory courses on theoretical computer science. One such challenge is understanding context-free languages and their various representations.…

During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…

Phoneme-level computer-assisted pronunciation training systems typically rely on phoneme-level annotations, which are costly and scarce. In this work, we investigate whether phoneme-level mispronunciation information can be learned without…

Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors…

Novice programmers are increasingly relying on Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code for learning programming concepts. However, this interaction can lead to superficial engagement, giving learners an illusion of learning and…

Infants face the difficult problem of segmenting continuous speech into words without the benefit of a fully developed lexicon. Several sources of information in speech might help infants solve this problem, including prosody, semantic…

This innovative practice article reports on the piloting of vibe coding (using natural language to create software applications with AI) for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education. We developed a human-AI meta-languaging framework…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…

Integrating pretrained speech encoders with large language models (LLMs) is promising for ASR, but performance and data efficiency depend on the speech-language interface. A common choice is a learned projector that maps encoder features…

Children can acquire language from less than 100 million words of input. Large language models are far less data-efficient: they typically require 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more data and still do not perform as well as humans on many…

Identifying design problems is a crucial step for creating plausible solutions, but it is challenging for design novices due to their limited knowledge and experience. Questioning is a promising skill that enables students to independently…

Encouraging children to read frequently and helping them to develop their reading skills as effectively as possible can be a challenge for some primary schools. This research questions whether the use of a game-based intervention can…

The interest in developing small language models (SLM) for on-device deployment is fast growing. However, the existing SLM design hardly considers the device hardware characteristics. Instead, this work presents a simple yet effective…