category: Education

Credit: Michael Horn, Northwestern University

Multi-touch tables can recognize and accommodate several users at once, allowing students to collaborate and learn while they play an engaging game.

Teaching Tree-Thinking Through Touch

Source: Science Daily

A pair of new studies by computer scientists, biologists, and cognitive psychologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts suggest that collaborative touch-screen games have value beyond just play.

Two games, developed with the goal of teaching important evolutionary concepts, were tested on families in a busy museum environment and on pairs of college students. In both cases, the educational games succeeded at making the process of learning difficult material engaging and collaborative.

The findings were presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) conference in May.

The games take advantage of the multi-touch-screen tabletop, which is essentially a desk-sized tablet computer. In a classroom or a museum, several users can gather around the table and use it simultaneously, either working on independent problems in the same space, or collaborating on a single project. The table accommodates multiple users and can also interact with physical objects like cards or blocks that are placed onto its surface.

Read more at Science Daily