Educational agents (including animal companions) are a kind of interface agent, which is a significant component in educational systems, and has great impacts on student learning. However, with the development of emerging technologies (e.g., tangible technology), few studies have yet investigated how tangible technology can be used to combine with…

The concept of usefulness has implicitly played a pivotal role in evaluation research, but the meaning of usefulness has changed over time from system reliability to user performance and learnability/ease of use for non-experts. Despite massive technical and social changes, usability remains the "gold standard" for system evaluation.…

As an exploration of the frustration experienced by users of an on-line interactive retrieval system, students participated in an experiment using an experimental reference retrieval system for library literature. It was anticipated that significant variations in user behavior would be displayed by the control and experimental groups. (19…