Context: In recent years the education community has seen an acceleration in the adoption of multi-touch surfaces for educational purposes due to a number of features that these surfaces present. Some of these features include the facilitation of multi-user interaction and collaboration. However, an interesting problem exists with legacy, single-touch educational systems that lend themselves well to the features of multi-touch but have been developed with a single-user interface in mind.
Objectives: This thesis investigates how to convert an existing single-user, single-touch system into a multi-user, multi-touch system while maintaining the existing educational aims and methods. The end result is a converted application called JLens and a list of goals for converting an educational system.
Methods: This study analyses the interaction points and potential conversion factors of an existing education application and defines a set of 4 goals for converting a single-touch educational system into a multi-touch one. The final product is a converted educational system that is evaluated by representatives from the local education authorities, the educational software developers TimeMaps, multi-touch hardware developers and fellow researchers. A combination of questionnaires and observations are used for research methods and the evaluators are asked to freely explore the converted system and provide feedback.
Results: The work identifies that the majority of the evaluators responded positively to the converted system. The observations show that the users understood how to operate the system very quickly and began collaborating by sharing data without any prompt. The quantitative analysis provides evidence that the conversion was successful and all of the research goals were met.
Conclusion: This thesis has demonstrated that JLens provides a viable framework for converting existing single-user, single-touch systems into multi-user, multi-touch systems by allowing many users to navigate and explore educational applications in a collaborative way
