Designing Tangible Tools to Engage Silent Students in Group Discussion

Students being silent during group work is a typical issue. Tangible user interfaces can bring learners together and orchestrate an active environment. Thus, they can mediate discussing conflicts among group members and facilitate as an equalizer allowing everyone to join the conversation. In this work, we used an iterative design approach to develop TalkinGlass, a tangible user interface, to help silent learners better engage in group work. In total, 28 university students took part in designing and evaluating TalkinGlass. The results show that when using TalkinGlass, silent students had a higher general and behavioral engagement than general students. In detail, we highlight three key findings: (1) The design mapping between engagement and tangible interaction could help us design a better interface for learning; (2) Increasing silent students' cognitive engagement was critical; and (3) TalkinGlass was suitable to orchestrate the group discussion when having clear activity scripts. From the human-computer interaction perspective, we provide a practical and feasible solution to help silent students in collaborative group work.