Orchestrating a multi-tabletop classroom: From activity design to enactment and reflection

If multi-tabletop classrooms were available in each school, how would teachers plan and enact their activities to enhance learning and collaboration? How can they evaluate how the activities actually went compared with the plan? Teachers' effectiveness in orchestrating the classroom has a direct impact on students learning. Interactive tabletops offer the potential to support teachers by enhancing their awareness and classroom control. This paper describes our mechanisms to help a teacher orchestrate a classroom activity using multiple interactive tabletops. We analyse automatically captured interaction data to assess whether the activity design, as intended by the teacher, was actually followed during its enactment. We report on an authentic classroom study embedded in the curricula of an undergraduate Management unit. This involved 236 students across 14 sessions. The main contribution of the paper is an approach for designing a multi-tabletop classroom that can help teachers plan their learning activities; and provide data for assessment and reflection on the enactment of a series of classroom sessions. © 2012 ACM