SciSketch: a tabletop collaborative sketching system

Sketching is a vital process in scientific research and procedural learning. In educational contexts, sketching helps students visualize abstract concepts and facilitates communication with their instructors as well as with other students. Inspired by a problem-based learning science class in which students use papers and pens to collaboratively sketch diagrams and equations for given problems, we aim to provide a digital tabletop platform for collaborative learning and customization. Current tabletop systems are unaffordable to be widely adopted in the classroom and are unable to identify multiple pens. We propose a pen-based tabletop system that utilizes a low-cost high-frame-rate infrared camera and HTML5 web canvas programming, making it cheaper and easier to customize for specific uses.