Social Interventions to Encourage Co-Located Collaborative Learning in a Tangible User Interface

Abstract

Technologies that support co-located group activity should not only provide a shared workspace, but they should also encourage collaboration. For this, it is necessary to know the structure of the group and how the members of the group work in order to achieve a common goal. In this paper, an observational study of groups of students interacting in a tangible user interface was performed. This study allowed us to identify social interactions and phenomena that can affect the collaboration and performance of the group. These phenomena can be for instance that some members of the group may contribute to the activity, while others may not. In order to minimize these phenomena in a co-located group activity, we propose interactions, which we call social interventions, that might be used by a coaching system to encourage group collaboration in co-located settings.