Hello, everyone.
I'm Gus.
I'm a second-year PhD in the Delta
Lab at Northwestern University.
Today, I'll be presenting the work my collaborators
and I did at UC San Diego over the past year.
Teams allow diverse individuals to come together
and do more work than any one person could do alone.
Forming teams is often done randomly
or with characteristic, like [INAUDIBLE] diversity,
[INAUDIBLE] knowledge, or management style.
While these methods have merits, they often
fail to surface intangible, yet important factors,
for successful collaboration, like report, trust,
or familiarity.
To account for these important factors,
prior research introduced the concept of team dating.
Team dating is based on speed dating
where people have short interactions
with potential teammates before committing to a long-term team.
While team dating is proving useful an online context,
it remains difficult to facilitate it in person,
like in a classroom where a students need
to physically move around.
While an instructor could verbally
tell students to form groups, that
does not assure that they will meet and interact
with new people.
To support team dating in in-person settings,
we build prototeams-- a new social computing system that
leverages personal mobile devices to rapidly form groups,
to deliver discussion prompts to participants,
and to collect peer assessments.
Here's how it works.
To help people get to know each other,
the app consists of a series of activities
focusing on facilitating small group interaction.
For each round of an activity, new groups are assigned.
So people can dynamically meet new members
and broaden their connections.
Every round follows these stages.
First, group formation.
Participants are assigned a group
and a corresponding colored shape
displayed on their phones.
Participants then form groups by finding others
with the same icon.
Second, group interaction.
Groups participate in a timed activity
that can be customized by the facilitator in advance.
Lastly, assessment.
Each member reflects on the group interaction and assesses
how well they got to know each of their team members.
As you can see from the video, it
gets chaotic to coordinate large in-person crowds,
to form new groups, and to interact with new people
every few minutes.
ProtoTeams helps participants navigate the space
using their phones, making it enjoyable for both participants
and facilitators.
To evaluate the system, we employed ProtoTeams nine times
in project-based classes, which included design, science,
engineering, and business.
We worked with instructors to set up the team dating activity
according to their preferences, in terms of amount of rounds,
time per round, and people per group.
In total, 406 students used ProtoTeams
before choosing teammates for a long-term project.
We collected system-long data, pre-post-survey responses,
observations, and interviews.
We were interested in the question
of what behaviors and reactions emerged
during in-class deployments of ProtoTeams.
We found that students enjoyed the team dating activity,
because they got to interact with new people.
One student talked about how it brings up new conversations
that they wouldn't have had before and meeting other people
was fun.
This was a very common reaction.
We also found that groups formed very fast.
It took an average about one minute to get people in groups
after showing the shape-color symbols.
And as you can see from the graph,
people got faster at forming teams as the session went on.
Participants appreciated how ProtoTeams
provides discussion prompts.
They say it was a great way to learn about people.
But they also wanted more constructive activities
to work together, something like a puzzle.
About 70% of participants failed to discern between group
members when assessing them.
So attributed that to time, because they only
interacted for five minutes.
Others said it was difficult to remember students
after so many rounds.
This work offers a preliminary study
of how technology can mediate rapid, small group interactions
and in-person settings.
If you're curious about more of our findings,
like how ProtoTeams influenced teammate selection,
we encourage you to check out our paper.
We see lots of areas for future work,
like exploring how team dating can
be made more accessible for different social settings
and audiences, or designing new activity prompts
to simulate team cooperation scenarios,
or even creating algorithms that suggest team configurations
based on assessment data.
If you have thoughts on these or the questions,
I'd love to hear from you.
Thank you, for watching this presentation and the NSF
for supporting this work.