TabletPC Technology at UNICAMP

Overview

This page was designed to provide information about the general usage of TabletPC inside UNICAMP. It was initially designed as a report to HP Technology for Teaching 2006 grant and evolved as a placehold for other TabletPC and wireless related usages in the Campus.

The HP Technology for Teaching 2006 first poster moved to this new location. The first view of the project has evolved with 4 month of TabletPC usage during classes. We can divide our project in two tracks:

• Software track: is where we try to design new tools to help professors to give better lectures using TabletPC and wireless technology.
• Course redesign track: is the way we use the new resources to enhance the existing classes, cover new topics and design new courseware from scratch.

See below more information about these two tracks.

We are also concerned about other technology that could be applied in education and how everything could be integrated together.

We have published the results of one of our evaluations and also our version of Classroom Presenter.

Feel free to get in contact if you want to know more about this initiative. Use the contact information on the right side of this page.

Also, you may be interested in this documents:

• Recording Lectures should be easy
• Implicit feedback using webserver log
• ImagineCup 2009 TabletPC Accessibility Award
  

TabletPC history at Institute of Computing - UNICAMP

We have dedicated a whole page for this history.

Software track

During the first classes using TabletPCs, we found that one of the most important fact to consider is the software to use. A well designed software, that is almost transparent, allow the students to keep their focus on the class. We call transparent software the one which has only enough functionality and allows:

• Content dissemination: for the instructor to the students in the class, and vice-versa
• Content storage: for easy of future use (by students mostly, but also for future redesign by instructors). We intend to store the class content on the TelEduc, which is an university wide Learning Management System.
• Ink capabilities: we are using TabletPCs, the ink capability must allow annotation, Q&A sessions, and partial exercises solution

We have been using Classroom Presenter and using the functionalities already provided up to now. We have also started developing some features we consider intersting to the class dynamics:

• Ink clusterization: when the instructor receives several answers from the students, he/she may need to create clusters to explain/correct the submissions. Ink clusterization does not try to correct the student submissions but try to make groups of similar submissions so that the instructor can easily check them for correctness, completeness, or any other criteria. We have now some results on  clusterization based on the position of the ink strokes on the screen.
• Direct feedback to the user: we consider that the way Classroom Presenter works for the user feedback can be improved if the instructor can check the student answer, write to it, and send back to the students without showing it to all the class. We are developing this feature.
• Screen capture: either full screen or partial screen capture is one feature that will allow the students to use other kind of software to solve their problems, like a digital circuit simulator, an evaluation of a software user interface, etc. We intend to allow the students to capture the screen and write over it, sending the result to the instructor as a slide. In this way, the exercise classes can be enhanced without having to include extra capabilities in the Classroom Presenter like those mentioned.
• Video recording: although it is not a new feature, integrating a video recording with our software allows the instructor to have an easy to use interface and also some new features like video navigation using slides.
• Accessibility tools: we are developing some tools to help people with different sort of disabilities to be engaged in the same classes with other students.

We have some presentations on this.

Course redesign track

We consider that content, software and hardware must be evaluated together. In 2007s2, the Multicore Course was designed to use the TabletPC infrastructure. The creation of new content can be even the removal of some diagrams from slides where the instructor and the students construct the solution together. An example of this feature can be seen in the  in the Cache Coherence class (in Portuguese, look the diagrams at the end of the presentation). The instructor slides and the students submissions (look the solutions proposed by the students) are available online for usage after classes. The same apply to the Parallel Programming concepts class, in this case, the students were required to design basic primitives of concurrent programming like Semaphores and Locks using hardware primitives like Test and Set.

In another usage, we tried to capture how tied we are to the software and ideas, trying to open our mind to different oportunities. We asked for another professor of our institute to use the TabletPC in her exercises classes and we made an overall evaluation. In this experiment, we used one TabletPC for every 3 students (the class size was 57 students) and used the basic Classroom Presenter in a Software Engineering class. Neither the professor, nor the students knew about our plans in software development for TabletPCs, here are some quotes from the students (original quotes in Portuguese were translated to English):

• It would be better if we could use an UML tool and write over it.
• The software misses some drawing tools like lines, squares, circles to make it easy do draw the diagrams. We would like to write also from the keyboard. The hardware is easy of use, making it interesting for people who need to draw.
• The software does not provide copy/paste functionality. It should also provide UML toolbar.
• It should be a UML drawing tool, with classes, diagrams templates, not only the pen.

Although this is just an evaluation from a small class, this isolated fact came exactly in the same way we expected. There were also a comment from the professor that she would like to provide individual feedback and not show the individual answers to the whole class.
When talking about online videos, we could get much more feedback from the students behavior by using the webserver log.

Impacts & Outcomes

When talking about numbers, we like to divide the results into two groups, prior to HP TFT 2006, where we had TabletPCs only to professors and after HP TFT 2006 where the students could use TabletPCs. We have almost 15 professors who somewhat used TabletPCs since the beginning here and a big number of students who got classes with them. But we will focus on the evaluations we did after 2007.

As results, we have published a Poster and an Abstract on WIPTE 2008, two papers were accepted on WIPTE 2009 and we also published a paper on a Brazilian conferece on Education (WIE 2009).

We also got the second place on the Imagine Cup 2009 TabletPC Accessibility Award.

Video and Photos

We took some pictures and videos, which are available in the media folder. The videos are in Portuguese and we are going to write the transcript in English.