Collaborating around digital tabletops: children’s physical strategies from the UK, India and Finland

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: the United Kingdom, India and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in India employed dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland used a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices

Design milieux for learning environments in African contexts

During the years 2002 to 2009, five African settings were used as foundation for designing different learning environments. While the content and target group for each learning environment varied, all of their design settings, or milieux, shared one implicit expectation: the milieu should facilitate the production of a change-making learning environment. A retrospective qualitative analysis identified a set of 10 common indicators that describe how successful a given setting is as a design milieu for creating learning environments. The study shows that for each design milieu indicator, a milieu can feature success and failure at the same time. The results, novel in their emphasis on the design setting rather than the use setting, can be used for both assessing the prospects of a particular milieu and improving its strengths for design opportunities especially in African or other developing contextsAcademy of Finland, grant #128577 (Duveskog, Sutinen)