SelectedWorks - Jerry Alan Fails

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Selected Works of Jerry Alan Fails

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Dr. Jerry Alan Fails joined Boise State University in 2016 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2009, where he was an active member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Dr. Fails’ general area of research is Human-Computer Interaction, with a current focus on technologies that support children’s creativity, mobility, and collaboration. The primary goals of his current research is to leverage technology to encourage children to engage with their environment and with one another (two things technology is blamed for doing the exact opposite), and to engage children in generative activities as opposed to consumer oriented activities. As part of this, Dr. Fails leads a collaborative effort called Geotagger which enables children to make and share environmental observations.

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About Jerry Alan Fails

Dr. Jerry Alan Fails joined Boise State University in 2016 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2009, where he was an active member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Dr. Fails’ general area of research is Human-Computer Interaction, with a current focus on technologies that support children’s creativity, mobility, and collaboration. The primary goals of his current research is to leverage technology to encourage children to engage with their environment and with one another (two things technology is blamed for doing the exact opposite), and to engage children in generative activities as opposed to consumer oriented activities. As part of this, Dr. Fails leads a collaborative effort called Geotagger which enables children to make and share environmental observations.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles (15)

Evaluating Digital Creativity Support for Children: A Systematic Literature Review (Marte Hoff Hagen, Daniela Soares Cruzes, Letizia Jaccheri, et al.) International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2023)

Creativity, the process of creating something new and valuable, benefits children by improving their skills and development, encouraging interaction and engagement, and enabling the generation and expression of novel ideas. In recent years, interactive digital ...

Pushing Boundaries of Co-Design by Going Online: Lessons Learned and Reflections from Three Perspectives (Jerry Alan Fails, Dhanush Kumar Ratakonda, Nitzan Koren, et al.) International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2022)

The global COVID-19 pandemic made significant changes to our day-to-day lives, which impacted how we conduct research and design — including co-design. In this article, we present case studies from three different co-design groups that ...

“Pictures are Easier to Remember Than Spellings!”: Designing and Evaluating KidsPic: A Graphical Image-Based Authentication Mechanism (Dhanush Kumar Ratakonda, Hoda Mehrpouyan and Jerry Alan Fails) International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2022)

Children encounter difficulties when they login to computers or websites because they have challenges remembering passwords. To improve children’s authentication, we conducted a series of formative studies with children (n = 8, ages 6–11) to ...

KidSpell: Making a Difference in Spellchecking for Children (Brody Downs, Maria Soledad Pera, Katherine Landau Wright, et al.) International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2022)

Children’s ability to spell effectively is a major barrier to using search engines successfully. While search engines make use of spellcheckers to provide spelling corrections to their users, they are designed for more traditional users ...

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: Why Using the “Right” Readability Formula in Children’s Web Search Matters (Garrett Allen, Ashlee Milton, Katherine Landau Wright, et al.) Advances in Informational Retrieval (2022)

Readability is a core component of information retrieval (IR) tools as the complexity of a resource directly affects its relevance: a resource is only of use if the user can comprehend it. Even so, the ...

Distributing Participation in Design: Addressing Challenges of a Global Pandemic (Jerry Alan Fails) International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2021)

Participatory Design (PD) – whose inclusive benefits are broadly recognised in design – can be very challenging, especially when involving children. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to further barriers to PD with such ...

The Role of Steps and Game Elements in Gamified Fitness Tracker Apps: A Systematic Review (Aatish Neupane, Derek Hansen, Jerry Alan Fails, et al.) Multimodal Technologies and Interaction (2021)

This article reviews 103 gamified fitness tracker apps (Android and iOS) that incorporate step count data into gameplay. Games are labeled with a set of 13 game elements as well as meta-data from the app ...

Child-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Technologies, and Big Data (Jerry Alan Fails) Interactions (2018)

The children's technology landscape is changing quickly. The ubiquity of interactive technologies means children can access them just about anytime, anywhere. At the same time, these technologies constantly collect data from and about children, bringing ...

Online Searching and Learning: YUM and Other Search Tools for Children and Teachers (Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Nevena Dragovic, Maria Soledad Pera, et al.) Information Retrieval Journal (2017)

Information discovery tasks using online search tools are performed on a regular basis by school-age children. However, these tools are not necessarily designed to both explicitly facilitate the retrieval of resources these young users can ...

Interactive Storytelling: Interacting with People, Environment, and Technology (Jerry Alan Fails, Allison Druin and Mona Leigh Guha) International Journal of Arts and Technology (2014)

Stories are an important part of children’s social and cognitive development and can be an integral part of their lives. In this paper, we share a short synopsis of Mobile Stories, one of the narrative ...

Cooperative Inquiry Revisited: Reflections of the Past and Guidelines for the Future of Intergenerational Co-Design (Mona Leigh Guha, Allison Druin and Jerry Alan Fails) International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2013)

Since its creation, the Cooperative Inquiry method of designing technology with and for children has been refined, expanded, and sometimes questioned. Cooperative Inquiry has been adopted and used widely throughout the world, and it continues ...

Methods and Techniques for Involving Children in the Design of New Technology for Children (Jerry Alan Fails, Mona Leigh Guha and Allison Druin) Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction (2013)

Children have participated in the design of technologies intended to be used by children with varying degrees of involvement, using diverse methods, and in differing contexts. This participation can be characterized as involving children as users, testers,informants, ...

Mobile Stories: The Evolution of a Mobile, Collaborative Story Reading and Creation Tool for Children (Jerry Alan Fails, Allison Druin and Mona Leigh Guha) International Journal of Arts and Technology (2012)

This paper discusses design iterations of mobile stories – a mobile technology that empowers children to collaboratively read and create stories. We present the design and discuss the impact of different collocated collaborative configurations for ...

Connecting Generations: Developing Co-Design Methods for Older Adults and Children (Bo Xie, Allison Druin, Jerry Fails, et al.) Behaviour & Information Technology (2010)

As new technologies emerge that can bring older adults together with children, little has been discussed by researchers concerning the design methods used to create these new technologies. Giving both children and older adults a ...

Working with Young Children as Technology Design Partners (Mona Leigh Guha, Allison Druin, Gene Chipman, et al.) Communications of the ACM (2005)

How children's technology is developed, and who is involved in the process, can vary greatly. While there are many roles children can play in the design of new technology, at the University of Maryland we ...

Cooperative Inquiry Revisited: Reflections of the past and Guidelines for the Future of Intergenerational Co-design (M. L. Guha, J. A. Fails and A. Druin) Action Research: Models, Methods, and Examples (2014)

A Child's Mobile Digital Library: Collaboration, Community, and Change (Jerry Alan Fails, Allison Druin, Benjamin B. Bederson, et al.) Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning (2009)

Data for the Review of Gamified Fitness Tracker Apps (Aatish Neupane, Derek Hansen, Anud Sharma, et al.) ScholarsArchive Data (2020)

This is a supplemental dataset to a paper that reviews 103 gamified fitness tracker apps and analyzes the presence and usage of various game elements. This dataset contains the list of those apps that were ...

Includes presented papers, published proceedings, and published abstracts

Ethics of Emerging Communication and Collaboration Technologies for Children (Juan Pablo Hourcade, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Tamara Clegg, et al.) CSCW '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (2023)

This SIG will provide child-computer interaction researchers and practitioners, as well as other interested CSCW attendees, an opportunity to discuss topics related to the ethics of emerging communication and collaboration technologies for children. The child-computer ...

5th KidRec Workshop: Search and Recommendation Technology Through the Lens of a Teacher (Monica Landoni, Theo Huibers, Maria Soledad Pera, et al.) IDC '21: Interaction Design and Children (2021)

In this past year, the role of technology to support education has been more prominent than ever. This has prompted us to focus the 5th Edition of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & ...

Engage!: Co-Designing Search Engine Result Pages to Foster Interactions (Garrett Allen, Ben Peterson, Dhanush Kumar Ratakonda, et al.) IDC '21: Interaction Design and Children (2021)

In this paper, we take a step towards understanding how to design search engine results pages (SERP) that encourage children’s engagement as they seek for online resources. For this, we conducted a participatory design session ...

Spellchecking for Children in Web Search: A Natural Language Interface Case-Study (Casey Kennington, Jerry Alan Fails, Katherine Landau Wright, et al.) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (2021)

Given the more widespread nature of natural language interfaces, it is increasingly important to understand who are accessing those interfaces, and how those interfaces are being used. In this paper, we explore spellchecking in the ...

That's Fake News!: Reliability of News When Provided Title, Image, Source Bias & Full Article (Francesca Spezzano, Anu Shrestha, Jerry Alan Fails, et al.) Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2021)

As news is increasingly spread through social media platforms, the problem of identifying misleading or false information (colloquially called “fake news”) has come into sharp focus. There are many factors which may help users judge ...

BiGBERT: Classifying Educational Web Resources for Kindergarten-12th Grades (Garrett Allen, Brody Downs, Aprajita Shukla, et al.) ECIR 2021: Advances in Information Retrieval (2021)

In this paper, we present BiGBERT, a deep learning model that simultaneously examines URLs and snippets from web resources to determine their alignment with children’s educational standards. Preliminary results inferred from ablation studies and comparison ...

Guiding the Selection of Child Spellchecker Suggestions Using Audio and Visual Cues (Brody Downs, Aprajita Shukla, Mikey Krentz, et al.) IDC '20: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (2020)

Spellchecking functionality embedded in existing search tools can assist children by offering a list of spelling alternatives when a spelling error is detected. Unfortunately, children tend to generally select the first alternative when presented with ...