Supporting Collaborative Activities in Computer Integrated ...gaips.inesc-id.pt/teatrix/papers/teatrix-criwg2000.pdf · Supporting Collaborative Activities in Computer Integrated

Supporting Collaborative Activities in Computer IntegratedClassrooms – the NIMIS Approach

Ulrich Hoppe1, Andreas Lingnau1, Isabel Machado2,Ana Paiva3, Rui Prada3, Frank Tewissen1

1University of Duisburg, Germany / 2CBLU – University of Leeds and INESC, Portugal /3IST, Technical University of Lisbon and INESC, Portugal

{hoppe,lingnau,tewissen}@informatik.uni-duisburg.de{isabel.machado,ana.paiva,rui.prada}@inesc.pt

Abstract

This paper presents the concept of acollaborative computer integrated classroom(CiC) specially designed to achieve a uniquecombination of interactive and collaborativesoftware with spatial arrangements, specialfurniture, and new peripherals including furniture(“roomware”). Although, technologicallyinnovative, the CiC approach respects grownpedagogical traditions and classroom procedures.In-line with the notion of ubiquitous computing ittries to augment the real classroom instead ofdefining a virtual learning environment.

Based on these principles, the European NIMISproject has put into practice a specific classroomenvironment for early learning with general toolsand specific applications supporting literacy-related activities. In addition to the collaborativenature of the classroom scenario as such specificmechanisms for co-construction in sharedworkspaces are provided.

1. A collaborative computerintegrated classroom for earlylearning

1.1. Ubiquitous computing in thecollaborative classroom

The notion of “ubiquitous computing” has beendeveloped in the 1980s at Xerox Parc [1]. If re-conceptualised today, it could be characterised asusing special purpose networked digital devices(rather than uniform computing equipment)embedded in natural environments, be it at home,

at work, or in educational settings. The NIMISproject aims at developing a special version ofubiquitous computing for a “computer integrated”primary school classroom. This is in-line withrecent integrative approaches to designing newinterfaces and interactive devices, e.g. under thenotions of “The Invisible Computer” [2],“Tangible Bits” [3] or “Roomware” [4]. A firstversion of the CiC as a general concept and firstprototypical implementation are described in [5].

This concept lets the traditional computers gomore to the background and invents newspecialised devices and interfaces driven byappropriate software architectures. Integratedapproaches take aspects of software, hardware andfurniture into account when designing mediaenvironments. To be successful in terms ofusability for and acceptance by the envisagedusers, the construction of such environments has totake the existing social interactions and needs intoaccount. Our recent experience and mostelaborated application of an integrated room is aCiC for young children (5-8 years old).

Evolving from the specific application for earlylearning, there is a clear general need of explicitlydefining the share of responsibilities and roles inthe interaction of humans and machines in CiCs. Inthis concrete design for early learners we followthese principles:• provide uniform access to multiple

representations of media and use a variety ofinformation sources;

• do not let the technology “get in the way”;• facilitate existing classroom procedures, and;• use a modular software architecture which

allows e.g. plugging in intelligent modules.

In the CiC we use the following basic hardwarecomponents:• a big interactive screen specially designed with

a height-adjustable touch-sensitive glasssurface,

• interactive pen-based LC-displays integratedwith the children’s tables as the primary inputdevice of the children.

The computers as such are “invisible” (i.e.concentrated in a separate room and not operateddirectly during a lesson) and integrated in a LAN.Fig. 1 gives an impression of an embeddedclassroom installation with integrated hardwarecomponents, particularly flat interactive tabletdisplays, and a big interactive screen.

Fig. 1. Use of pen-based devices

To make sure that new media technologysupports learning and does not redefine well suitedpedagogical procedures, we studied existinginteractions and curricular activities in theclassrooms of today’s primary schools. The CiCinstances that exist now in schools in Germany,England and Portugal, have been setup in closecooperation with teachers and test groups of youngchildren.

Although new technology should not redefinepedagogy, new roles may evolve from thesespecial environments for the teachers and thechildren. Teachers act as information managers,and thus have to learn about new ways ofaccessing information and to judge and select fromqualitative new kinds of information. The same istrue for the children: Without explicitlymentioning the computer as a topic, the childrenget used to manage data and information and workwith different devices and in different groupconstellations supported by the technology.

1.2. Classroom and school environments

Kirchstrasse and O Nosso Sonho are two of thethree schools collaborating in the NIMIS project,

that have installed the CiC in one of theirclassrooms.

GGS Kirchstraße in Duisburg is a normalcurricular primary school. In general, the childrenare taught in individual work phases in which theteacher organises the learning environment but thestructuring of activities, (what has to be donewhen), is done by the children themselves. Theteachers act, most of the time, as moderators andthey decide what the line of work will be for theschool day. Currently, the school is changing theway that reading and writing is taught. Thetraditional way of letter-by-letter or whole-wordlearning is now being replaced by the methodcalled “Reading through Writing” which isprovided by the T3 application (see Fig. 5).

The NIMIS classroom in Duisburg is equippedwith 8 computers, which are situated in a separateroom. There are six tables in three groups, withbuilt in WACOM tablets, loudspeakers and anoptional keyboard and a large interactive screenfor finger based input (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. The NIMIS classroom in Duisburg

O Nosso Sonho is a school located in thesuburbs of Lisbon, which covers a wide variety oflearning stages and activities: kindergarten, freetime occupation, psychological support, andprofessional training. Further, O Nosso Sonho isnot a curricular school, and its pedagogicalapproach aims at providing the children with thepossibility to choose, freely, the daily activitiesand this way promoting the acquisition of maturedecisions by the children. The pedagogical strategybegins in the spatial organisation of the school. So,the learning activities are distributed in differentrooms with different goals and aptitudes. Forexample: (1) in the Dramatic Room, children cando dramatic performances of fairy tales or freetheme stories, and (2) in the Intellectual Room is aplace for the children to write, play with the

computers (games, puzzles, educational software,etc.) and with traditional educational games.

The CiC is installed in one corner of theIntellectual Room (see Fig. 3) and this new settingallows the children to continue doing their usualactivities as well as having the opportunity to bringthe dramatic performances to the computerisedenvironment and together to act out their ownstories.

Fig. 3. The NIMIS classroom in Lisbon

2. General tools for classroommanagement

2.1. The NIMIS desktop

To provide networked interactive working andcollaboration, the NIMIS Desktop has beendeveloped as a multifunctional tool to be used bypupils and teachers cooperatively. The basicfunctionality is shown in Fig. 4.

2.1.1. Companions and archivingAs a child-oriented metaphor for handling andvisualising different objects and media and forproviding consistent orientation and guidance, wehave introduced a companion or computer friendas a virtual representative of the child. The childlogs in to the computer by calling the companionfrom a window on the desktop. The companionappears and shows the child’s data with smallpreview images (see Fig. 4, in the upper left). Thechildren’s data view consists of a list of symbolicgeneral purpose and special (e.g. incoming mail)folders. Older children may start thinking abouttheir own organisation and use special folders anddrag and drop operations to arrange their data.

2.1.2. Login procedures and information flowTo cope with the special requirements, NIMIS hasdesigned and implemented new policies fordesktop operations, which differ from the usualconventions. To support the physical cooperationof children sharing one tablet on a table, theNIMIS desktop allows for two children to log in atthe same time on one machine and work togetherat their desktop. Both have their own companion towhich they can hand over documents they haveproduced. Joint products can be copied using adesktop “copier” and may be archivedindividually. When a child logs out, the companiondisappears and goes to sleep. This is also true,when a child logs in on a different machine: Thechild is automatically logged out in the formerdesktop, i.e. at a certain point in time, a child’scompanion has one defined location.

Fig. 4. Elements of the NIMIS Desktop

Fig. 5. Typical flow of information

Fig. 5 shows a typical action cycle and flow ofinformation: Going to the scanner, the child callshis or her companion (a frog with a number in thiscase). The companion appears on the screen nextto the scanner and shows the newly scannedimage. Returning to the child’s workplace he or shecalls the companion again. The companiondisappears on the scanner machine and appears atthe workplace’s interactive display, carrying thescanned image. The metaphor of letting a virtualcompanion carrying and managing the child’s dataturned out to be a very natural way of promotingawareness of different concepts of data for the sixyear old children.

3. Forms of collaboration in theNIMIS classrooms

3.1. General features

The general design of a NIMIS classroom isfocused on supporting the ordinary classroomactivities, which are typically multi-threaded inthat pupils work alone, in pairs or in larger groupson potentially different topics or assignments. Amain function of the teacher is to stimulate,coordinate, and, if necessary, control thesemultiple individual and collaborative activities. Inthis sense, the teacher can be seen as a manager ofclassroom activities and of information resources.To support this, the NIMS classroom provides asupervision interface, which displays the locationof logged-in children in the classroom. Theinterface also allows for sending assignments tothe children and to observe their current state ofwork.

In addition to supporting general classroominformation management, NIMIS developsspecific applications in the area of early literacy,including the acquisition of initial reading andwriting skills as well as aspects of story creation(writing, enacting/playing and watching). Twoexample applications are described in thefollowing section.

All NIMIS tools and applications can be run inshared workspace or synchronous communicationmode, supported by the Java MatchMakercommunication mechanism (see section 4). Thisallows for co-constructive activities in differentareas of literacy and narrative expression.However, again, NIMIS is not focused on remotecommunication and children may also justcooperate sitting side by side on the same table.This kind of collaboration is supported by thespecific login and archiving mechanisms describedabove. Generally speaking, the NIMIS conceivescollaboration as a ubiquitous activity in theclassroom, which is only partially mapped ontotechnically mediated communication.

3.2. The case of T3

The T3 (“Today’s Talking Typewriter”)application which is primarily used in the Germanclassroom supports the method of “Lesen durchSchreiben” (Reading through Writing, RtW), awell known method for teaching reading andwriting skills to early learners.

Fig. 6. The T3 application

The method is based on the principle thatchildren first start to write phonemes which theyderive from decoding spoken words. In T3, this isdone using a “phoneme table”, from which theydrag letters into a workspace to form phonetically(not orthographically) correct words. Immediate

feedback is given by a Text-to-Speech system(TTS) so that the children can listen to the wordthey have composed (see Fig. 6).

In the non-computerized classroom practice, thefeedback cycle starts with an exact pronunciationof the writing provided by the teacher. Using T³,children can press the “speak” button wheneverthey wish to hear the complete text or a singleword that they were most recently working on.

The T3 application is currently being enhancedwith intelligent support. The support is based on ageneral architecture for implementing bothpersonalized as well as functionally embeddedagents [6]. Intelligent support is not refined toindividual feedback but includes support forcollaboration following a “peer helper” principle[7]. Take, e.g., a situation in which one child isworking on a word, which has been written byother children before. The work of the child will besupervised by an implicit agent, which means anintelligent module basing on the common agentarchitecture but without a visible “body”. If theagent detects that there were other children whohad problems related to a similar word, a selectionof these children will appear (see Fig. 7) and thechild has the choice to hear the words of the otherchildren, working with the word written by another child or initiating collaboration for workingtogether on this word.

Fig. 7. Visualisation of individual results.

Collaboration here could take place bothoutside and inside the system. Outside could meanthat one will ask the other child directly and theywill work together at the same workplace. Insidethe system a collaborative session can be initiatedwhere two or more T3 applications coupled. Thechildren share the workspace so that everyone willsee all changes made by the other without loosinglocal data. In the current implementation thephoneme table will be divided so that one childgets the vowels, the other children will have theconsonants. While working together on a word onechild can act now as a “vowels advocate” andsupervise the using of vowels in a word while the

other child has the control of the consonantsneeded for a word (see Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Collaboration with T3.

3.3. The case of Teatrix

Teatrix is a collaborative virtual environmentfor story creation, which aims at providingeffective support for young children (7-9 yearsold) developing: (1) their notions of narrative,through the dramatisation of different situations;(2) their social relations, through the interaction bymeans of their characters; and (3) their ability totake different perspectives across the experience ofwide range of situations.

3.3.1. Collaborative story creationNarrative and storytelling start to make part of

our lives since early childhood, when children startto hear the first stories through their parents andsiblings’ voices. After having explored the worldthat surrounds them, children start to acquire theirfirst concepts about the objects and events of theworld, begin to construct more decentralized playsand start also to include the others in their make-believe world. At this point they also start to usecommon objects in such a way that they becamemagical and powerful props in their stories, forexample: a stick that becomes a horse [13].

Following Piaget's theory, this evolution of themake-believe activities allows children to performdifferent roles, gain control of the course of theaction and acquire the skills to organise thesequence of a play and most importantly to projectthese experiences into the cognitive and socialrequirements of the real world.

Based on these evidences we decided to bringthe make-believe activities to the computerisedenvironment and to provide the means for childrento collaborate in the story creation process andimplicitly promoting social interactions amongthem.

3.3.2. Design of TeatrixBefore designing Teatrix, a set of informal

experiences was run in the Portuguese school “ONosso Sonho”. In these informal experiences, weobserved children of several ages performing fairytales in different settings: theatre and puppetscenes. The results of such observations showedthat:• during the story performance, younger children

(4-6 years old) needed more scaffolding fromthe teacher than the oldest ones (7-8 years old);

• children spent a long period of time tocharacterise (in order to better “incarnate” theircharacters);

• the older the children the better they followedtheir roles in the play, and stayed in characterthroughout the story progression;

• at acting time, older children coordinatebetween themselves in order to ensure that thestory was being conveyed to the audience inthe meaningful way;

• the teacher usually played the role of thenarrator, and acted also as a mediator;

Based on these results we designed Teatrix [12] inwhich follows a theatrical metaphor and has astarget public children between 7 to 8 years (similardecisions and results concerning the children ageswere found in the Kidstory i3net project [9]).

The story creation environment is divided inthree steps, strongly related with the theatricalperformances:

1. The Backstage – this option offers the childrenthe possibility to prepare the scenes, props andcharacters for each story.

2. On Stage – which provides the children withthe possibility to initiate one story and to startthe acting. Before starting the acting activity,each child has to choose a character to control.In this environment, there is also thepossibility to have system-controlledcharacters After having chosen the characters,children are ready to start their performances,which take place in a collaborative 3D world(see Fig. 9). From the story creation process a“film”-like object is created. This “film”-likeobject offers the children a product they cananalyse and even reconstruct in futureperformances.

3. The Audience or Public - is based on theartefact produced from the story creationprocess. In this phase, children can be theaudience of their own performances andwatch their previous performances and alsohave the possibility to write about thosestories.

3.3.3. Collaborative story creation in TeatrixTeatrix can be considered as a system that

enables collaboration since it provides the childrenwith the necessary means to act autonomously, butat the same time being aware of the presence ofothers and having freedom to coordinate efforts inorder to achieve a collaborative story.

On Stage option is a collaborative tool thatallows several children to work simultaneously onthe same story. In this case virtual realitytechnology plays an important role in this phase,because it provides the children with the means toexplore the scenes during the story creation [8].

Fig. 9. Teatrix: On Stage Option - two children playing with two different characters

The story evolves whilst the children worktogether to achieve a common goal: their story.Furthermore, the children get much more from aninteraction or experience if in the end they willcreate a meaningful artefact, that they can exhibitas a proof of their personal or collaborative work[10]. Each child acts in the story by means of acharacter, her/his adopted character.

Each character in Teatrix has a role to play, forexample: a villain, a hero, a magician, etc. Theroles definition was based on the seminal workdone by Propp [15] on one hundred Russianfolktales (see [14] for more details on thecharacters definition), which define and establishthe functional role of an agent, by means of thespecification of the actions and roles for it.

During the story creation process, each childsees the actions performed not only by her/hischaracter but also by the characters in the samescene. The children can talk to each other in orderto coordinate their activities as well ascollaborating through their controlled characters.For example: the magician (controlled by onechild) may need to give a magic element to thehero (controlled by another child) for him to defeatthe villain.

4. Implementation and technicalplatform

The NIMIS desktop, the T3 and Teatrixapplications were developed using the Javaprogramming language. The communication andcollaboration is technically based on a WindowsNT network and the Java MatchMaker (JMM)software library and server [8]. Every Desktop isconnected via JMM to a central ClassroomService,which supports centralised access to• a database where the core information about

the users is stored (e.g. to which group usingthe classroom a child belongs, which is thechild’s companion, etc.),

• central logging of children’s activities withinthe classroom (e.g. starting an application,writing a word with the T3 application) and

• monitoring central control facilities for theteacher (e.g. to show who is logged in whereand what applications are currently used).

T3 and Teatrix use a general Java-based XMLformat for storage. The audible feedback isprovided by an external Text To Speech (TTS)system.

The T3 application relies on a Prolog conversionalgorithm to provide special phoneme control

sequences that are used to emphasise certain partsof a word or to prevent the TTS system fromspelling every single letter in a word.

Teatrix application, in addition to the standardJava Development Kit, also uses the Java 3D APIfor the implementation of the 3D environment(world, characters and props) and the Java ExpertSystem Shell (Jess) for development of the agent’sreasoning modules.

5. First experiences

For the teachers and children in Duisburg theuse of the NIMIS classroom was a seamlesstransition from the normal classroom to thecomputerised environment. After a short period ofinitial guidance most of the pupils were able to usethe NIMIS environment autonomously, i.e.particularly teacher-independent writing. Thisenables the teachers to use their time moreefficient to support children with special needs,e.g. children with German as their secondlanguage.

One important result is that the quantity andquality of writing products is much higher withinthe NIMIS classroom, i.e. by using the T3

application, than in the normal classroom situation.Especially those children who are scared of writingtake an advantage by using the T3 application andits text to speech synthesis of the written content.Here they can try out independently thecomposition of phonemes without the directobservation of the teacher (this happensautomatically in the normal classroom situationwhen the teacher reads out the writing of a child).Afterwards the data logging of the activities withinthe NIMIS classroom (e.g. starting an application,dragging a phoneme into the T3 workspace) isvisualised as a tree of HTML documents (see Fig.10). This view gives the teacher a comprehensiveimpression of ongoing activities, thus enabling thesupervision of the children’s achievements.

Fig. 10. Visual log from NIMIS activities

In O Nosso Sonho, the CiC environment hasbeen installed since middle March and the firstresults showed that children were very keen to useit and becoming very skilful with it. Theseopinions are expressed by their comments aboutTeatrix:

• It’s funny, instead of doing the drawings touse in the story we can pick them from a listof characters, props and scenes and in theend we build the story

• It’s a fantasy of heroes and princesses. It’sentertainment in the computer!

• Teatrix is a like a theatre, where we can playtogether. What I like most is the feeling ofbeing inside the characters. In Teatrix wecan do things that all others can watch, andthat is very important because by this wayeverybody can participate in the stories.

• Is for us to do theatre.

Despite their positive opinions, they have alsodemanded for: more scenes, more props, morecharacters and also a higher level of control overthe story characters. To fulfil these needs a newtool is being integrated in the system.

6. Conclusions

We are convinced that the NIMIS experiencepractically demonstrates the viability of new formsof integrative technological support in a wholeclassroom, yet subordinate to grown pedagogicalmethods. It supports a mix of natural andtechnologically mediated forms of collaborationand of classroom information management. Therole of teachers is explicitly defined andparticularly reflected in the software tools. Aseamless transition from the traditional classroomto the CiC could be observed as well as anincreased productivity in both quantitative andqualitative terms.

7. Acknowledgements

Parts of this work refer to the Esprit project No.29301, “NIMIS”. We thank our NIMIS partnersfor the good and constructive cooperation, andespecially the teachers and pupils of the associatedschools for constructive discussions and creativeinput.

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