Preliminary experiences with a tablet PC based system to support active learning in computer science courses

  • Authors:

  • Beth Simon;Ruth Anderson;Crystal Hoyer;Jonathan Su

  • Affiliations:

  • University of San Diego, San Diego, CA;University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

There has been much research on the benefits of active and collaborative learning and on its use in computer science courses. As classroom technology becomes more prevalent it is natural to develop systems that support the use of these techniques. We have developed such a system as an extension to Classroom Presenter [2], a Tablet PC-based presentation system. In our system students (or groups of students) are equipped with tablet computers and at various points during the lecture, are asked to solve a problem or respond to a question. Students respond by writing their solution on the tablet and submitting it wirelessly to the instructor. The instructor can view all student responses, select one or more to display to the class, and annotate responses with ink as they are being displayed. Student responses can be saved for review after lecture by the instructor or made available electronically to the students. In this paper we describe the system and our initial experiences using the system in two classes (CS1 and Computer Ethics) at the University of San Diego in Fall 2003.