Constructive collaboration can be a difficult matter. For this reason, we are implementing and studying an interactive-tabletop-mediated activity that aims at inducing collaboration among participants. The resulting activity 'Orbitia' is designed as a serious game. Participants are asked to act as a spacemining crew, which has to collect minerals with a rover and rely on a cameradrone for reconnaissance, while keeping the rover out of harm and managing limited resources. In this paper we provide an account of how we designed Orbitia's pedagogical structuring by relying on the Johnsons' cooperative learning approach whose fundamental concept is "positive interdependence". More particularly, we show how we worked on resource, role and task interdependence to design three collaboration-inducing 'flagship' devices: the roversteering-device (RSD), the item-locating-device (ILD) and the responsibilityactivating-device (RAD).

This paper is concerned with how the spatial distribution of written informings in a serious game activity at an interactive tabletop (ITT) induces participants to read aloud interactionally relevant information to each other in the process of co-constructing a shared understanding. Engaging in an unfamiliar game activity, the participants are all equally dependent on written informings from the interface that serve as a game manual and provide crucial information for jointly achieving the game task(s). When it comes to making use of these written informings, we find the participants to read them aloud, making them accountable within the group. Our findings from multimodal video analysis of two reading-aloud cases suggest that the written informing’s directionality and distribution (here, either designed as ‘distributed’ or ‘shared’ among the interface) regulate the participants’ access to information. And that participants who cannot visually access the information they are interested in reading (aloud) co-organize fine-grained joint successive actions build on and actualized by read-aloud utterances. These joint actions allow them to align their orientation and share their understanding of game activity-relevant content.

The design space of tangible and multi-touch tabletop interfaces is complex, and little is known about how the different characteristics of tangible and multi-touch interactive features affect collaboration strategies. With this work, we report on five different features designed for an interactive tabletop application to support collaborative problem-solving. We present the design details and describe preliminary results obtained from a user study with 15 participants. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → User studies; Collaborative interaction; User centered design.

To support collaboration, researchers from different fields have proposed the design principles of shareability (engaging users in shared interactions around the same content) and positive interdependence (distributing roles and information to make users dependent on each other). While, on its own, each principle was shown to successfully support collaboration in different contexts, these principles are also partially conflicting, and their combination creates several design challenges. This paper describes how shareability and positive interdependency were jointly implemented in an interactive tabletop-mediated environment called Orbitia, with the aim of inducing collaboration between three adult participants. We present the design details and rationale behind the proposed application. Furthermore, we describe the results of an empirical evaluation focusing on joint problem-solving efficiency, collaboration styles, participation equity, and perceived collaboration effectiveness.

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