Jochen Rick

Collaborative games: lessons learned from board games

Collaborative mechanisms are starting to become prominent in computer games, like massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs); however, by their nature, these games are difficult to investigate. Game play is often complex and the underlying mechanisms are frequently opaque. In contrast, board games are simple. Their game play is fairly constrained and their core mechanisms are transparent enough to analyze. In this article, the authors seek to understand collaborative games. Because of their simplicity, they focus on board games. The authors present an analysis of collaborative games. In particular, they focus on Reiner Knizias LORDOFTHERINGS, considered by many to be the quintessential collaborative board game. Our analysis yields seven observations, four lessons, and three pitfalls, that game designers might consider useful for designing collaborative games. They reflect on the particular opportunities that computers have for the design of collaborative games as well as how some of the issues discussed apply to the case of computer games.

Around the table: are multiple-touch surfaces better than single-touch for children's collaborative interactions?

This paper presents a classroom study that investigated the potential of using touch tabletop technology to support childrens collaborative learning interactions. Children aged 7-10 worked in groups of three on a collaborative planning task in which they designed a seating plan for their classroom. In the single-touch condition, the tabletop surface allowed only one child to interact with the digital content at a time. In the multiple-touch condition, the children could interact with the digital content simultaneously. Results showed that touch condition did not affect the frequency or equity of interactions, but did influence the nature of childrens discussion. In the multiple-touch condition, children talked more about the task; in the single-touch condition, they talked more about turn taking. We also report age and gender differences.

Beyond Adoption to Invention: Teacher-Created Collaborative Activities in Higher Education

The potential learning benefits of the Web are diminished due to the complexity of creating interactive, collaborative Web-based applications. The CoWeb is a collaborative Web site that allows users to create collaborative applications with great flexibility. The CoWeb facilitates open authoring where any user can edit any existing page or creating new pages. Using the CoWeb, both teachers and students have invented a wide variety of educational applications. Thus, the CoWeb serves as an example of an educational technology that has led to teacher inventiveness.

Actions speak loudly with words: unpacking collaboration around the table

The potential of tabletops to enable groups of people to simultaneously touch and manipulate a shared tabletop interface provides new possibilities for supporting collaborative learning. However, findings from the few studies carried out to date have tended to show small or insignificant effects compared with other technologies. We present the Collaborative Learning Mechanisms framework used to examine the coupling of verbal interactions and physical actions in collaboration around the tabletop and reveal subtle mechanisms at play. Analysis in this way revealed that what might be considered undesirable or harmful interactions and intrusions in general collaborative settings, might be beneficial for collaborative learning. We discuss the implications of these findings for how tabletops may be used to support childrens collaboration, and the value of considering verbal and physical aspects of interaction together in this way.

Situating CoWeb: a scholarship of application

Since 1998, we have been developing and researching CoWeb, a version of Wiki designed to support collaborative learning. In this article, we summarize our results of situating CoWeb across the academic landscape of Georgia Tech. In architecture, CoWeb enabled faculty to serve more students in a design-based course. In English composition, a comparison study demonstrated significant learning benefits without incurring disproportionate costs. Yet, situating CoWeb was not always successful. In many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes, students actively resisted collaboration. From these studies, we conclude that the culture of the classroom and the discipline needs to be compatible with the medium for computer-supported collaborative learning to be effective. Finally, we demonstrate how collaboration can be designed into the culture. A new class on introductory computing was explicitly designed to take advantage of the collaborative possibilities that CoWeb affords. We report our findings of the success of this approach. We characterize this research as a scholarship of application. We demonstrate that this mode of scholarship is a viable mode of scholarship in the learning sciences. Unlike traditional scholarship of discovery, we are not solely concerned with discovering new knowledge. Instead, we support others in the application of a new technology to serve genuine and complex learning situations. By doing so, we seek to understand the potential that one new medium, a Wiki, has for supporting learning.

Children designing together on a multi-touch tabletop: an analysis of spatial orientation and user interactions

Applications running on multi-touch tabletops are beginning to be developed to enable children to collaborate on a variety of activities, from photo sharing to playing games. However, little is know as to how children work together on such interactive surfaces. We present a study that investigated groups of childrens use of a multitouch tabletop for a shared-space design task, requiring reasoning and compromise. The OurSpace application was designed to allow children to arrange the desks in their classroom and allocate students to seats around those desks. A number of findings are reported, including a comparison of single versus multiple touch, equity of participation, and an analysis of how a childs tabletop position affects where he or she touches. A main finding was that children used all of the tabletop surface, but took more responsibility for the parts of the design closer to their relative position.

Recognizing and supporting roles in CSCW

In this paper, we describe our experience with the long-term, widespread use of CoWeb, an asynchronous collaborative tool that is mostly used to complement existing face-to-face groups (such as classes). The CoWeb is an openended tool that does not enforce or explicitly support specific roles or usage, yet several well-defined uses and roles have emerged over time. In our design methodology, we recognize these roles and refine our collaboration environment to better support them.

Beyond one-size-fits-all: how interactive tabletops support collaborative learning

Previous research has demonstrated the capacity of interactive table-tops to support co-located collaborative learning; however, these analyses have been at a coarse scale---focusing on general trends across conditions. In this paper, we offer a complimentary perspective by focusing on specific group dynamics. We detail three cases of dyads using the DigiTile application to work on fraction challenges. While all pairs perform well, their group dynamics are distinctive; as a consequence, the benefits of working together and the benefits of using an interactive tabletop are different for each pair. Thus, we demonstrate that one size does not fit all when characterizing how interactive tabletops support collaborative learning.

Collaborative learning at low cost: CoWeb use in English composition

CoWeb is a collaborative learning environment used in many classes at Georgia Institute of Technology; it is an extremely simple domain-independent collaboration tool. Our aim is to show that such a simple system can sustain useful peer-to-peer and instructor-to-student interaction that fosters better performance and learning, without incurring a high cost. In this paper, we present evidence of the success of this tool in supporting learning at low cost in one environment---freshman-level English classes.

Fighting for control: children's embodied interactions when using physical and digital representations

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.