Multi-touch technology in a higher-education classroom: lessons in-the-wild.

Inspired by the promise of tabletops for collaborative learning, and building on the many tabletop lab studies, and a few in-the-wild tabletop classrooms, we designed the first semester-long use of a multi-tabletop classroom for two university subjects, with 105 and 40 students respectively. Surprisingly, we found that with just three applications, designed to meet emerging teaching goals, we could support diverse classroom activities. Our technology also featured key minimalist functions that proved effective in enhancing the teacher's management of the class. This points to a research agenda for the applications and functionalities needed to make tabletop classrooms a reality. This paper describes the design process we followed to deploy multi-touch technology as a classroom ecology and the lessons learnt from the semester-long use in two authentic university courses.