Functional Interruption Management Systems

Abstract

Coding mentors must gauge when a student is engaged or not in their primary task before interrupting them. Gauging student engagement is a difficult task when one mentor is responsible for mentoring many students in a classroom; at times, mentors have taught 30 students in one classroom. An inopportune interruption leads to disruption and lowers performance on the primary task a student is attempting to complete, whereas failing to provide timely support could result in a student giving up on the lesson. A programmatic approach to interrupting students would be less disruptive, especially in a virtual setting, and would enable mentors to focus on more ``difficult" queries from students. Synthesizing the mentors' experiences as well as a literature review we formulate our goal as: \textbf{How might we interrupt students for announcements or to collect feedback, such that it results in the least amount of disruption to the interrupted student?} The primary solution offered is the design and implementation of an Interruption Management System (IMS) in the functional programming language, Elm. An IMS helps users to effectively perform their primary task by minimizing the disruptive nature of an interruption. This research explores the non-trivial task of detecting when a user is engaged in their primary task, when to interrupt them such that there is minimum disruption, and how to determine how ``disruptive" an interruption is to a user. Two iterations of an IMS prototype design and implementation, and an evaluation plan for the prototype are presented to answer the aforementioned motivating problem.