Learning with interactive tabletop displays

Groupwork is core to the educational process at all levels, with peer learning activities demonstrated to be an important component in exploring new idea spaces. Recent advances in technology encourage a re-examination of ways that technology can support and expand groupwork. This paper examines how large multi-touch tabletop displays can be used by students in group information exploration, creation, and sharing situations. The multi-user, multi-touch features enable multiple people to transition between individual and group interactions with the display, rather than the turn-taking interactions common in older technologies. While this provides opportunities, it also presents challenges in the ways that activities for the shared space are crafted, executed, and evaluated. This paper describes how our software solutions encourage idea exchange, sharing, and awareness of the activities of others, toward crafting better artifact-centered educational experiences. Specifically, the paper describes three techniques for card-based explorations that help enable groupwork: semantic zoom, dynamic grouping and info glow. Semantic zoom considers how pinch zooming can vary not only artifact size but also artifact content, showing more information at larger sizes. Dynamic grouping features the card combination which facilitates idea generation and synthesization. Info glow highlights artifacts that have been recently accessed or changed, providing an enduring way to see modifications made by others. This paper explores usage of this environment and these techniques, focusing on their impacts on educational goals and objectives for K-8 and for undergraduates, to understand how students in pairs or triads work independently and together as they explore and create within information spaces. Results suggest that older students tend to engage more with each other, though students of all ages transition between quiet individual work and communicative group work. The techniques described in this paper inform ways that they can be configured to optimize idea exchange, sharing, and awareness, and ways that tools and classroom techniques can encourage a more dynamic and engaged learning environment.