Tabletop displays for small group study: affordances of paper and digital materials

In this paper we compare the affordances of presenting educational material on a tabletop display with presenting the same material using traditional paper handouts. Ten pairs of undergraduate students used digital or paper materials to prepare for exams during four one-hour study sessions over the course of a term. Students studying with the tabletop display solved problems on their own before resorting to answer keys and repeated activities more often than students studying with paper documents. We summarize study activities and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each medium.

[1]  M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale,et al.  Territoriality in collaborative tabletop workspaces , 2004, CSCW.

[2]  Tracy Brown,et al.  The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience , 2002, Cybern. Hum. Knowing.

[3]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Release, relocate, reorient, resize: fluid techniques for document sharing on multi-user interactive tables , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[4]  Trent Apted,et al.  Tabletop sharing of digital photographs for the elderly , 2006, CHI.

[5]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  Multimodal multiplayer tabletop gaming , 2007, CIE.

[6]  Yvonne Rogers,et al.  Collaborating around vertical and horizontal large interactive displays: which way is best? , 2004, Interact. Comput..

[7]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  Real time groupware as a distributed system: concurrency control and its effect on the interface , 1994, CSCW '94.

[8]  Jefferson Y. Han.  Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection , 2005, UIST.

[9]  Andreas Paepcke,et al.  Cooperative gestures: multi-user gestural interactions for co-located groupware , 2006, CHI.

[10]  F. D. Kahn,et al.  A survey of note-taking practices , 1992 .

[11]  Maneesh Agrawala,et al.  DIZI: A Digital Ink Zooming Interface for Document Annotation , 2005, INTERACT.

[12]  Ahmed K. Noor.  Ambient Intelligence and Its Potential for Future Learning and Virtual Product Creation Environments , 2006 .

[13]  Lara M. Triona,et al.  Hands on What? The Relative Effectiveness of Physical versus Virtual Materials in an Engineering Design Project by Middle School Children , 2007 .

[14]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  SDGToolkit: A Toolkit for Rapidly Prototyping Single Display Groupware , 2002 .

[15]  David Klahr,et al.  Point and Click or Build by Hand: Comparing the Effects of Physical vs. Virtual Materials on Middle School Students' Ability to Optimize an Engineering Design - eScholarship , 2005 .

[16]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  DiamondSpin: an extensible toolkit for around-the-table interaction , 2004, CHI.

[17]  Jean-Bernard Martens,et al.  Read-It: five-to-seven-year-old children learn to read in a tabletop environment , 2004, IDC '04.

[18]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Beyond "social protocols": multi-user coordination policies for co-located groupware , 2004, CSCW.

[19]  Ali Mazalek,et al.  Teaching table: a tangible mentor for pre-k math education , 2007, TEI.

[20]  Pierre David Wellner,et al.  Interacting with paper on the DigitalDesk , 1993, CACM.

[21]  Allison Druin,et al.  Single display groupware: a model for co-present collaboration , 1999, CHI '99.

[22]  Jun Rekimoto,et al.  Augmented surfaces: a spatially continuous work space for hybrid computing environments , 1999, CHI '99.

[23]  Anne Marie Piper,et al.  Supporting medical conversations between deaf and hearing individuals with tabletop displays , 2008, CSCW.

[24]  Bernard Horan,et al.  Supporting flexible roles in a shared space , 1998, CSCW '98.

[25]  Anne Marie Piper,et al.  SIDES: A Cooperative Tabletop Computer Game for Social Skills Development , 2022 .

[26]  Mark Rowlands,et al.  The body in mind , 1999 .

[27]  Allison Druin,et al.  Child's play: a comparison of desktop and physical interactive environments , 2005, IDC '05.

[28]  Mark W. Newman,et al.  The designers' outpost: a tangible interface for collaborative web site , 2001, UIST '01.

[29]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  Affordances for manipulation of physical versus digital media on interactive surfaces , 2007, CHI.

[30]  Mike Wu,et al.  Multi-finger and whole hand gestural interaction techniques for multi-user tabletop displays , 2003, UIST '03.

[31]  Darren Leigh,et al.  DiamondTouch: a multi-user touch technology , 2001, UIST '01.

[32]  Paul J. Diefenbach,et al.  Applications of multi-touch gaming technology to middle-school education , 2008, SIGGRAPH '08.

[33]  Christine Reid,et al.  The Myth of the Paperless Office , 2003, J. Documentation.

[34]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think , 2003 .

[35]  Hiroshi Ishii,et al.  The metaDESK: models and prototypes for tangible user interfaces , 1997, UIST '97.

[36]  Sara Price,et al.  Animated Diagrams: How effective are explicit dynamics for learners? , 2002 .