Matthew Kam

Livenotes: a system for cooperative and augmented note-taking in lectures

We describe Livenotes, a shared whiteboard system and educational practice that uses wireless communication and tablet computing to support real-time conversations within small groups of students during lectures, independent of class size. We present an interface design that enables group members to interact with one another by taking lecture notes cooperatively, as well as to augment student note-taking by providing instructor slides in the background to annotate over. Livenotes was designed to facilitate more efficient, stimulating modes of learning that other collaborative approaches do not. We report how the system impacts cooperative learning in an undergraduate class and how students interacted with background slides in the workspace. We conclude with directions for improving the system and learning practice.

An exploratory study of unsupervised mobile learning in rural India

Cellphones have the potential to improve education for the millions of underprivileged users in the developing world. However, mobile learning in developing countries remains under-studied. In this paper, we argue that cellphones are a perfect vehicle for making educational opportunities accessible to rural children in places and times that are more convenient than formal schooling. We carried out participant observations to identify the opportunities in their everyday lives for mobile learning. We next conducted a 26-week study to investigate the extent to which rural children will voluntarily make use of cellphones to access educational content. Our results show a reasonable level of academic learning and motivation. We also report on the social context around these results. Our goal is to examine the feasibility of mobile learning in out-of-school settings in rural, underdeveloped areas, and to help more researchers learn how to undertake similarly difficult studies around mobile computing in the developing world.

Improving literacy in rural India: cellphone games in an after-school program

Literacy is one of the great challenges in the developing world. But universal education is an unattainable dream for those children who lack access to quality educational resources such as well-prepared teachers and schools. Worse, many of them do not attend school regularly due to their need to work for the family in the agricultural fields or households. This work commitment puts formal education far out of their reach. On the other hand, educational games on cellphones hold the promise of making learning more accessible and enjoyable. In our projects 4th year, we reached a stage where we could implement a semester-long pilot on cellphone-based learning. The pilot study took the form of an after-school program in a village in India. This paper reports on this summative learning assessment. While we found learning benefits across the board, it seemed that more of the gains accrued to those children who were better equipped to take advantage of this opportunity. We conclude with future directions for designing educational games that target less well-prepared children in developing regions.

Social dynamics of early stage co-design in developing regions

Technology arguably has the potential to play a key role in improving the lives of people in developing regions. However, these communities are not well understood and designers must thoroughly investigate possibilities for technological innovations in these contexts. We describe findings from two field studies in India and one in Uganda where we explore technological solutions in the domains of communication, microfinance and education. Two common underlying themes emerge from these studies: (1) local stakeholders can contribute cultural information relevant to design such as needs and practices through interaction with technology artifacts and (2) unique social network structures embedded within communities are crucial to the acceptance and potential adoption of technology. We end with a synthesis of the three experiences that draws some practical lessons for ICT designers to elicit meaningful feedback and participation from local stakeholders in developing regions communities.

Designing digital games for rural children: a study of traditional village games in India

Low educational levels hinder economic empowerment in developing countries. We make the case that educational games can impact children in the developing world. We report on exploratory studies with three communities in North and South India to show some problems with digital games that fail to match rural childrens understanding of games, to highlight that there is much for us to learn about designing games that are culturally meaningful to them. We describe 28 traditional village games that they play, based on our contextual interviews. We analyze the mechanics in these games and compare these mechanics against existing videogames to show what makes traditional games unique. Our analysis has helped us to interpret the playability issues that we observed in our exploratory studies, and informed the design of a new videogame that rural children found to be more intuitive and engaging.

Practical considerations for participatory design with rural school children in underdeveloped regions: early reflections from the field

This paper draws on a 2-week design workshop conducted at a rural primary school in northern India to provide recommendations on carrying out participatory design with school children in rural, underdeveloped regions. From our experiences in prototyping low-tech and hi-tech English language learning games with rural student participants, we advocate that researchers build a more equal relationship that is qualitatively different from one between teachers and students, enlist local adults and children as facilitators, and explore hi-tech prototyping to inspire the best designs.

Let's play chinese characters: mobile learning approaches via culturally inspired group games

In many developing countries such as India and China, low educational levels often hinder economic empowerment. In this paper, we argue that mobile learning games can play an important role in the Chinese literacy acquisition process. We report on the unique challenges in the learning Chinese language, especially its logographic writing system. Based on an analysis of 25 traditional Chinese games currently played by children in China, we present the design and implementation of two culturally inspired mobile group learning games, Multimedia Word and Drumming Strokes. These two mobile games are designed to match Chinese childrens understanding of everyday games. An informal evaluation reveals that these two games have the potential to enhance the intuitiveness and engagement of traditional games, and children may improve their knowledge of Chinese characters through group learning activities such as controversy, judgments and self-correction during the game play.

Towards a design model for women's empowerment in the developing world

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof argues that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world. In this paper, we present a design model for empowering low-income women in the developing world, in ways that cut across individual application areas. Specifically, this model characterizes a possible trajectory for NGOs and women to engage with each other and among themselves potentially augmented by technology to help women escape from poverty. The fieldwork components in this study took place over 15 weeks in three phases, with a total of 47 NGO staff members and 35 socio-economically challenged women in rural and urban India. Interviews and co-design sessions with seven proof-of-concept prototypes showed that women appeared to belong to five distinct stages of growth in striving towards independence. We report the technology design lessons from our co-design sessions to illustrate how user readiness, relationship building at the community and family levels, and integration with state, national and international level programs, should be taken into account in the broader context of intervention design.

Designing educational technology for developing regions: some preliminary hypotheses

Based on our findings from an ongoing pilot with shared computers in rural primary schools in Uttar Pradesh, India since 2001 and two follow-up field studies in the same schools in 2004, we propose some principles for designing educational technology for developing countries as hypotheses. They include constructivist, small-group collaborative learning through digital storytelling and integrating paper- with computer-based practices. We also discuss the need to balance pedagogy, usability and mobility.

Reducing dominance in multiple-mouse learning activities

In resource-constrained classrooms in the developing world, it is common for several students to share each computer. Unfortunately, dominance behavior often naturally emerges in these situations, when one child monopolizes the mouse and keyboard. One way to mitigate this phenomenon is by providing each child with a mouse and a corresponding on-screen cursor so that everyone can interact. Though such multiple-mouse configurations reduce the possibility of total domination by one individual, they do not automatically eliminate dominance behavior completely. We propose the use of a design for small-group learning on shared computers based on enforced turn-taking in a split-screen, multiple-mouse environment. In an evaluation with 104 rural schoolchildren in India, we found that dominance behavior was indeed reduced through these design choices.