Examining Emergent Dominance Patterns in Multiple Input Based Educational Systems

Past work with multiple input devices in low resource educational environments has largely been motivated by patterns of dominance that emerge when a large group of students is asked to share a single computer — inevitably, some students, at the cost of others, derive higher value out of the experience. Conversely, concern has been expressed about the lack of social learning and collaboration that results when students are given computers for individual usage. One means of addressing both concerns is to design multiple-input-based educational experiences to encourage collaboration among students. To explore this approach, we compared several different educational game setups in a controlled study with 192 primary school students in Bangalore, India. In the course of this study, we found that as collaboration was encouraged or enforced, patterns of dominance began to re-emerge, even though students each had direct interactivity with the computer. In this paper, we examine and discuss these patterns as they relate to intervention design and environment.