Microsoft Surface in a classroom

On Monday lecture we talk, on one side, about interactive tabletops, and on the other, about children and groupware. There I got the idea to write about Microsoft´s attempt to introduce their tabletop device Microsoft Surface into the educational environment. On this post, I present my ideas from both, the pedagogical and groupware perspective, about children interacting with an interactive tabletop in a classroom.

• Kids are not afraid of technology. Instead, they are curious and interested on using it. What is more, many children are used to interact with computers, video games and other devices just for fun, therefore, they might get more of a “fun” feeling than a “school” feeling out of the interaction with the Surface.

• A teacher or assistant should act as a moderator in order to achieve the learning goal of the application and explicitly verbalize what is going on to promote the interaction within the shared workspace.

• Tactile input method is easy for kids. The hand movements are natural and intuitive, and children learn faster from a combination of movements and perceptions. For small kids, is specially important to have big targets and good error handling.

• The interaction with a physical workspace as Surface offers many degrees of freedom (1). The moderator should be able to notice the body language, such as the posture and position of each child to gain awareness of the group dynamics and encourage collaboration among all the members.

• The possibility of manipulating shared objects (or artifacts) that can be used in an interactive way might be helpful for children to understand and relate concepts. However, the control of the artifacts should be moderated, if required, to reduce potential conflicts.

• Unlike blackboards, Surface enables collaboration in parallel with a dynamic feedback. However, as it do not manage to detect difference between user´s touch, the individual progress should be monitored by the mediator.

• The WYSIWIS approach of Surface helps kids to stay aware of their own actions and other´s actions, however, a poor coordination on the activities may lead to bump into other´s work and the possibility to alter their progress.

• Getting “hands on” learning is specially attractive to children, and can be used as an alternative to kids that have special needs when learning in a traditional class environment.

• Kids learn from watching and listening others. The gestures used to control Microsoft Surface can be used to support the interaction along with the verbal communication, as they are used to directly support the conversation and convey task information (1).

• The Surface offers a limited amount of spaces for children to interact, and as the price of interactive tabletops is still quite elevated, is important to assure that all the kids have the same right over the interaction with the device.

In conclusion, I think that Microsoft Surface or any other interactive tabletop can be useful in the educational environment if it has an intuitive interaction design and good handle of error-prone situations. However, as in a regular classroom, the teachers should moderate the whole experience so that the learning goals are achieved through collaboration.

(1) Baker, K., Greenberg, S. and Gutwin, C. (2001) Heuristic Evaluation of Groupware Based on the Mechanics of Collaboration. Proceedings of the 8th IFIP Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI'01). (May 11-13, Toronto, Canada).