Collaborating around Digital Tabletops

Abstract

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: the United Kingdom, India and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in India employed dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland used a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices.

VERITAS: Mind-Mapping in Virtual Reality

“…While the current scope of VERITAS is a single-user mindmap activity, the leap to a collaborative mind-mapping application is obvious. When collaborative mind-mapping is carried out on tabletops, the collaborative exercise results in specific patterns of communication and strategies for managing conflict [58]. These arise due to the need to control shared pieces of information (e.g., tiles) and their relative positions.…”

Collaborative Tabletops for Blind People

“…In the past decade, interactive tabletops have been successfully used in multiple domains, including healthcare, education, entertainment, and cultural exhibitions [2,18,34,36]. These devices show significant advantages in supporting multi-user interaction, namely due to their large shared surface.…”