Po-Yao Chao

The Interactive Multimedia Textbook: Using A Digital Pen to Support Learning for Computer Programming

Through a field study computer science practices, we observed that students not only rely on the computer but also the programming textbook. To get overall comprehension, students organize their effort in understanding the abstract concept in the textbook and tracing the program execution constantly. The observations motivated us design an interactive textbook that integrates paper books with interactive multimedia supports for learning computer programming. Students could understand how program works from browsing multiple perspectives of program execution. We also facilitate the on-line query, enabling students to construct their own links with digital information. An evaluation with 11 students found this system can offer efficient access to the digital information while remain concentrating their attention on paper textbook, in a manner felicitous with their current reading practice.

Integrated Textbook: Augmenting Paper Textbooks with Digital Learning Support Using Digital Pens

Although quality of display devices is good right now, most textbooks are still printed on papers. At the same time, most learning support and e-learning courseware are built with the assumption that the student only read information displayed on the screen. In this paper, we present an environment that provides learning support via computers, digital devices and network when a student studies a course by reading paper textbooks with a digital pen. The learning support is organized based on the knowledge unit of the location positioning by the digital pen in the textbook. The support includes term explanation, related discussions, underline, and annotation. These studying actions and results on papers will be stored in the computer as well for later use. Initial experiment result on using the system shows that students feel beneficial to their study.

Interacting with paper: coordinate systems as tools to link paper with mobile phones

This study presented a methodology in which the paper and a mobile phone can complement each other to facilitate ubiquitous learning support. Students, teachers and experts forming a learning community could support with each other as well as exchange their opinions ubiquitously through the links of interactions among paper and mobile phones. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the reading preference as well as effect on learning performance and interviews to explore the interaction among them. Experiment results and interviews showed students preferred reading large text on the paper while browsing recommendation messages or summaries on mobile phones with the help of the paper interface. In addition, these manners of interactions could provide more opportunities for learning support and could have a positive effect on learning performance.