Deploying and Visualising Teacher’s Scripts of Small Group Activities in a Multi-surface Classroom Ecology: a Study in-the-wild

Abstract

There is a fast growing interest in the use of interactive surfaces in collaborative learning contexts. These devices hold the promise to enrich a typical collocated class by enabling learners to interact with digital content while maintaining face-to-face mutual awareness. However, little has been done to help teachers deploy and monitor the learning scripts for their planned small group activities in a classroom enhanced with these kinds of devices. We present an approach for deploying and visualising the teacher’s script for small group idea generation and problem solving activities in a multi-surface classroom ecology that is composed of multiple interactive tabletops, public vertical displays and a teacher’s dashboard. We frame our study by drawing on design guidelines for classrooms with multiple interactive surfaces and combine these with principles of scripting and orchestration of learning activities. The paper presents the results and experiences of the implementation of our approach, in an authentic deployment of our classroom ecology, held over 8 weeks in a semester, involving 150 university students and 4 teachers. The paper concludes with remarks about the strengths and shortcomings of our approach, to be taken into account by learning practitioners and designers.