IMMERSe – Supporting Awareness and Encouraging Collaboration in Bring-Your-Own-Device Classroom Environments

When students use mobile devices in a classroom, teachers cannot easily know if students are actively engaged in group activities or if they are distracted. For example, a student may be observing the activities of others rather than contributing to group workspace. Even though students are in close proximity, they can be too focused on their own work and fail to notice relevant work from other groups. The students may miss the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. This project aims to provide teachers with awareness of class activities to help them monitor students’ progress and provide in time help. For students, the project will provide awareness of other groups’ work and apply gamification techniques to encourage engagement in inter-group collaboration in a shared digital workspace through their mobile devices. The project will benefit SMART Technologies by investigating ways to convey awareness information to teachers and encourage student cross-group collaboration in the SMART ampTM application.

Faculty Supervisor:

Stacey Scott

Student:

Partner:

SMART Technologies (Calgary, AB);SMART Technologies (Kanata, ON)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Education; Manufacturing

University:

University of Waterloo

Program: