Capturing and analyzing verbal and physical collaborative learning interactions at an enriched interactive tabletop

Interactive tabletops can be used to provide new ways to support face-to-face collaborative learning. A little explored and somewhat hidden potential of these devices is that they can be used to enhance teachers’ awareness of students’ progress by exploiting captured traces of interaction. These data can make key aspects of collaboration visible and can highlight possible problems. In this paper, we explored the potential of an enriched tabletop to automatically and unobtrusively capture data from collaborative interactions. By analyzing that data, there was the potential to discover trends in students’ activity. These can help researchers, and eventually teachers, to become aware of the strategies followed by groups. We explored whether it was possible to differentiate groups, in terms of the extent of collaboration, by identifying the interwoven patterns of students’ speech and their physical actions on the interactive surface. The analysis was validated on a sample of 60 students, working in triads in a concept mapping learning activity. The contribution of this paper is an approach for analysing students’ interactions around an enriched interactive tabletop that is validated through an empirical study that shows its operationalization to extract frequent patterns of collaborative activity.