Co-BrainSystem: Supporting brainstorming to enhance collaborative work in educational environments

Engaging students in active learning is an important challenge in today's classrooms. The proposal presented in this paper aims to take advantage of the benefits offered by new technologies in order to increase creativity and expressiveness in educational environments. In order to achieve this, we have designed and developed a system that allows the use of creative learning techniques such as Brainstorming. Co-Brain-System is a collaborative and interactive system aimed at improving brainstorming sessions in learning scenarios. The system is composed of a shared and a private workspace. The Shared workspace is used to display information, ideas, documents and feedback of what is happening in the session. The private workspace consists of Tangible Interfaces integrating emerging technology, in this case RFID tags and a mobile device that integrates an RFID Reader. The system is based on MDE (Multi-Device Environments) and uses a new mode of interaction called Approach & Remove that allows users to handle Distributed User Interfaces easily.