Dissertation. — University of Washington, 2004.
Students’ active participation in the learning process is a critical factor in its success. Unfortunately,
the predominant, lecture style of university education rarely generates this active
participation. This dissertation describes a series of three Tablet PC-based educational
technologies and their use to study and promote interaction in the university classroom. All
three tools take advantage of the critical role presentation slides play in mediating learning
in many modern university classrooms. The development and study of all three tools follows
the design experiment methodology, a cyclical process of classroom observation
to understand challenges to interaction, design of interventions to address these challenges,
and study of those interventions in real classrooms, leading to a new cycle. In
particular, this dissertation describes the Classroom Presenter system for Tablet PC-based
presentation, the Classroom Feedback System for student feedback in the context of lecture
slides, and the Structured Interaction Presentation System for unified design of interactive
and static presentation material.