Rationale We believe that the use of tablet PCs will be beneficial for students and instructors. From our students' perspective, we see the following benefits: By using a different interaction paradigm, students will be forced to reconsider many of the assumptions about the design and implementation of computer-based systems. Some activities during the design, development, and implementation phases can be performed more naturally with a tablet PC (precise direct manipulation of objects). Students will have immediate access to all the materials the instructor is using, and can annotate the materials directly, and perform exercises immediately. We previously did a small pilot version of this in other courses thanks to a small number of tablet PC's donated by HP over the past 2 years. This has been very well received by faculty and students. From an instructor's perspective, we see the following additional benefits: Computer-based lecture material can easily be annotated. Activities like interactive exercises, quizzes, and questionnaires, provide immediate feedback about the students' understanding of the material. Our main emphasis, however, lies in the use of tablet PCs as development and deployment platforms with significantly different characteristics from the desktop or laptop computers students and faculty typically use.

Implementation (pedagogy) The pedagogy used in the affected courses will not be changed dramatically. The courses are taught in a combination of lecture and lab sessions. The main impact of the tablet PCs will be in the term projects conducted by teams of students. While we may not have enough tablet PCs to provide every student with one (our enrollment in those classes can be around 30 students), each team will have at least two tablets to work with. We have some faculty members who have been using tablet PCs for teaching for a few years, and their experiences will be considered for this project. The resources used are less of an instructional and more of a technical nature, mostly Web sites by manufacturers such as HP as well as operating system and software developers like Microsoft. Tablet PC and Computing Curriculum 2004 RFP Awards Short descriptions of projects sponsored by Microsoft that use tablet PCs in education. Microsoft MSDNAA Curriculum Repository The Student Tablet PC Web Site Collection of information on tablet PCs from a student perspective

Implementation (technology) Common to all of the courses listed above will be changes that enable students to benefit from immediate, interactive access to learning material. This will range from minor modifications like the arrangement of activities in class or in lab, to the development of interactive exercises, questionnaires, and quizzes for feedback and evaluation purposes. All of the courses above also have a term project as one of the main student activities. The availability of a set of tablet PCs will enable the use of far more advanced communication and collaboration methods than we are relying on currently. The project specifications and requirements are also to some degree targeted towards more conventional platforms like desktop and laptop PCs, and will have to be modified for the use of tablet PCs as development and deployment platforms. For both the Software Engineering and the User Interface Design courses, we typically use a theme throughout one or two quarters. The current CSC 484 User Interface Design and Development course, for example, employs assignments, activities, and a term project that deal with the redesign of parts of Cal Poly's library into a Learning Commons, where library patrons (in particular students) can engage in activities that combine research, communication and collaboration supported by an appropriate infrastructure. Currently, a team of students led by Dr. Michael Haungs are developing a front end for a large geospatial data base to be used by a local elementary school in a geography assignment on the California missions. The software developed in this project will be complete by spring 2006 and used by the elementary school students in the 2006-2007 academic year, and students from the User Interaction Design classes will conduct a usability evaluation of the software and the tablet PCs. HP Training Material for Tablet PCs Microsoft Tablet PC Home Page Resources for Tablet PC Developers

Impact on Teaching The main goals of our proposal are: to use a platform with different capabilities and constraints as development and deployment system for software engineering and user interaction design and development to conduct a usability evaluation of tablet PCs in general, and specifically as development tools for software engineering and user interface development to gather practical experience for students and faculty in using mobile devices for learning and teaching. The key aspects for student learning in our proposal are the experiences students gather by working with the devices. We are planning to measure and document the following indicators: changes in learning methods facilitated by mobile devices new and modified learning and teaching methods and techniques subjective feedback from instructors and students the extra time required for preparation of teaching materials time saved through the use of mobile devices differences between long-term and short-term use of the tablet PCs by students

Cal Poly CSC Students Ben Weber and Dennis Taylor (photo by Brett Bojduj)

Quick Facts Dept: Computer Science Courses Impacted: User Interaction Design and Development, Software Engineering # Students Impacted: about 100 per year # Faculty Involved: Franz J. Kurfess, Michael Haungs This project is funded in part by an HP Technology for Teaching grant.

Franz J. Kurfess Contact Us Dr. Franz J. Kurfess, Professor Computer Science Department California Polytechnic State University 1 Grand Avenue San Luis Obispo, CA 94307-0354 Phone: (805) 756-7179 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~fkurfess Hoang Bao, Graduate Student Computer Science Department, Cal Poly Email: [email protected]

Impact on Student Learning We expect our students to gain practical experience with the use of tablet PCs for software development and user interface design. In addition, the students will design and develop software specifically with tablet PCs as target platform, forcing them to consider the differences in usage that implies. Currently, our students are very focused on the use of desktop and laptop PCs as development and deployment platforms. Occasionally, they are confronted with the need to consider other platforms such as handheld computers or cell phones, but only to a very minor degree. In this project, the students will be forced to re-consider some of their very basic notions of user interaction, such as the use of a keyboard for text input, and a mouse or trackpad as a pointing device. As an outcome, we expect these students to have a significantly better understanding of user interaction methods, resulting in systems that are designed in a much more user-centric way. At the moment, we are working on the practical arrangements, which will have some influence on the data collection. Ideally, we would like to run two sections of the same course in parallel, one using traditional labs with desktop PCs, and one using tablet PCs. The courses under consideration, however, are mostly offered once per year, so as an alternative we may have student teams working on the same project topic with desktops vs. tablet PCs.

References & Publications See the links under the "Implementation" sections.

This project supported in part by an HP Technology for Teaching grant.