I have designed a college-level course to help college-aged students build and maintain healthy friendships. Every week, students will engage in collaborative activities and learn a variety of topics related to friendship, including the benefits of friendship, barriers to friendship, and friendship maintenance mechanisms. As part of their final project, students will demonstrate their knowledge of making and maintaining healthy friendships by completing a case study in which students will be expected to apply their learnings from class to a chosen friendship and observe how the friendship changes as a result. In order to establish the need for the course I made, I first conducted a literature review on friendship, loneliness, and factors that may contribute to young adults having difficulties making friends.

Engaging users is essential for designers of any exhibit, such as the human-computer interface, the visual effects, or the informational content. The need to understand users’ experiences and learning gains has motivated a focus on user engagement across computer science. However, there has been limited review of how human-computer interaction research interprets and employs the concepts in museum and exhibit settings, specifically their joint effects. The purpose of this study is to assess users’ experience and learning outcome, while interacting with a web application part of an exhibit that showcases the NASA Psyche spacecraft model. This web application provides an interactive menu that allows the user to navigate on the touch panel installed within the Psyche Spacecraft Exhibit. The user can press the button on the menu which will light up the corresponding parts of the model with a detailed description displayed on the panel. For this study, participants were required to take a questionnaire, a pretest, and a posttest. They were also required to interact with the web application while wearing an Emotiv EPOC+ EEG headset that measures their emotions while they were visiting the exhibit. During the study, data such as questionnaire results, sensed emotions from the EEG headset, and pretest and posttest scores were collected. Using the information gathered, the study explores user experience and learning gains through both biometrics and traditional tools. The findings show that users felt engaged and frustrated the most and that users gained more knowledge but at varying degrees from the interaction. Future work can be done to lower the levels of frustration and keep learning gains at a more consistent rate by improving the exhibit design to better meet various learning needs and visitor profiles.

Jane Austen’s beloved naval brother, Charles Austen (1779–1852), had a significant impact on her literary career.We find probable traces of him in the male characters appearing in Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), and he is said to have offered naval vocabulary to help his sister revise the second edition of Mansfield Park (1816). In addition to his impact during Jane’s lifetime (1775–1817), Charles played a role in sustaining her posthumous celebrity, modest as it was at first. Two previously unpublished brief letters by him—and references to him in other correspondence—offer an opportunity to speculate about his role in supporting his late sister’s literary reputation.