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In recent years, handheld devices have been playing an important role in children's learning. How to utilize mobile devices such as handheld devices to support collaborative learning has been an important research topic of Computer‐Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Educators in Japan are seeking an educational system structure that supports “integrated courses,” which have been introduced due to the revision of National Curriculum Standards. We focused on a museum as one of the appropriate locations where “integrated courses” are held and constructed a system named Musex for supporting children's learning with two personal digital assistants (PDAs). Musex provides children with opportunities to answer questions related to exhibitions collaboratively. We performed an experiment on Musex in a science museum and discuss the results in this paper. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(14): 54–63, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10696

Mobile devices have acceleratedly penetrated into our daily lives. Though they were originally designed as a communication tool or for personal use, and due to the rapid availability of wireless network technologies, people have begun to use mobile devices for supporting collaborative work and learning. There is, however, a serious problem in mobile devices related to their user interfaces. In this paper, we try to alleviate the problem and propose intuitive techniques for information transfer, which is one of the typical usages of mutually-connected computers. Our system, Toss-It, enables a user to send information from the user's PDA to other electronic devices with a "toss" or "swing" action, like a user would toss a ball or deal cards to others. The implementation of Toss-It consists of three principle parts-gesture recognition, location recognition, and file transfer. We especially describe the details of gesture recognition and location recognition. We then evaluate the practicability and usability of Toss-It through the experiments. We also discuss user scenarios describing how Toss-It can support users' collaborative activities.

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