Education
The presence of technology in education is increasing at a rapid pace. Electronic classrooms are being used for instruction, the World Wide Web is being used to access vast warehouses of knowledge, and interactive systems are providing "hands-on" learning experiences. The boundaries of our classrooms are changing. Technology is making it easier for students to collaborate with peers, consult with experts, and share their findings. Through our research, we hope to gain a better understanding of the role technology plays in education and to provide guidelines for creating effective learning environments.
Current Projects
BIRD Note-taking system
Allows the integration of dynamically captured presentation materials with student notes.
Children as Design Partners (Intergenerational Design Teams)
Children, ages 7-11, work with HCIL faculty/staff/students after school and over the summer to create new technolgies for children.
Classroom of the Future
Mobile and embedded technologies are created in partnership with pre-school children and teachers at the Center for Young Children.
International Children's Digital Library
A library that provides free access to children's books from around the world. By ensuring access to books from many cultures and in diverse languages, we foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world illiteracy.
Mobile Collaboration for Young Children
Mobile devices can support the learning experience as children create narratives in various contexts. Mobile device limitations can be overcome by bringing people and devices together. In addition, social interaction and collaboration are essential to the emotional and cognitive development of young children.
Tablet Mylar Slides
A TabletPC-based replacement for traditional mylar slides that supports private notes, "infinitely" long slides, and publishing to the web.
Tangible Flags
Using Tangible Flags, children on field trips can easily collaborate to create and connect digital information to the real world, but also have the flexibility to explore independently.
Past Projects
Animal Blocks
Our design team partnered with Neurosmith to design an animal version of MusicBlocks, an educational toy for young children.
Baltimore Learning Community
An electronic learning community that provides teachers with multimedia resources that are linked to outcome-oriented curriculum guidelines.
Collaborative Storytelling: KidPad
Created in partnership with children in Sweden, UK, and U.S., this zooming application enables children to tell stories with multiple mice.
HyperCourseware and Interactive Learning
HyperCourseware is a system of interlocking programs and files that serve as an electronic infrastructure for classroom and distal learning to create electronically what had previously been in notebooks, on the blackboard, and in textbooks
Learning Historian
The Learning Historian record the history of user interaction with a simulation and allows this history to be replayed for review, sent with a message, used in a tutorial, or replayed as a series of variants to facilitate comparisons and explorations.
PETS: A Personal Electronic Teller of Stories
These robotic animals enabled children to be storytellers. Now it is a commercial product from Anthrotronix called CosmoBot.
Research Issues in the Electronic Classroom
We evaluated electronic classrooms used to support collaborative strategies for learning. The AT&T Teaching Theater and the IBM-TQM Teaching Theater provided an unusual opportunity to investigate the application of hypermedia and collaborative groupware to lecture and college seminar environments.
Simulated Processes in a Learning Environment (SimPLE)
An application framework for creating simulation-based learning environments.
StoryRooms
Children are able to build their own rooms to tell their own stories using mobile and embedded technologies.
