Come see Lifetime Research Award winner, Yvonne Rogers, present her life’s work.

Abstract: I have always been fascinated with technology. When I was very young, back in the 70s, I came across Pong – an early computer game that involved sliding a digital bat up and down a screen to hit a digital disc. I loved playing it side-by-side with a friend, laughing, shouting, whooping and sharing tactics together. Since then, I have never looked back, always challenging myself to work out how to design all manner of technology to excite and provoke us; augmenting how we learn, think and talk. My first foray into designing new interfaces was to support learning where we developed novel multimedia interfaces to encourage young children to understand the world around them through interacting with abstractions and formalisms. We designed them to be playful and to encourage children to experiment with counterfactuals [6]. For this, we designed dynamically-linked visualisations that bridged the gap between abstractions of an ecosystem, such as food web diagrams, and the corresponding ‘real world’, through a playful, interactive simulation of animals and plants in a pond. Changes in one were matched by changes in the other. Children could manipulate aspects of the food web to see what would happen if that was the case – for instance, seeing an animation of weeds eating a perch. We were able to demonstrate how this kind of interactive digital simulation enabled children to understand how to use formalisms as computational aids to reason about a complex system while having lots of fun at the same time. It was the start of many exciting adventures.