Enhanced Co-located Collaborative Learning of Bahasa Malaysia through Multi-touch Educational Application on Cost Effective Tabletop

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1 Enhanced Co-located Collaborative Learning of Bahasa Malaysia through Multi-touch Educational Application on Cost Effective Tabletop LEE YEE LIEN, CHEONG SOON NYEAN, YAP WEN JIUN Faculty of Engineering Multimedia University Jalan Multimedia, Cyberjaya, Selangor MALAYSIA Abstract: Multi-touch tabletop has been used in European countries as an education tool to enhance learning. However, the adoption rate has been slow by schools as the cost of ownership is too expensive. Besides, only limited multi-touch educational applications are available today. Thus, this paper presents a cost-effective FTIRbased multi-touch tabletop and multimedia-enriched educational applications designed specifically for co-located collaborative learning of Bahasa Malaysia for pre-school children. The system is able to support co-located collaborative learning for pre-school children to learn more effectively by providing a more engaged and focused learning tool. The multi-touch tabletop was deployed into kindergartens and favourable feedback was received from the school teachers in terms of the engagement of the children s attention and focus in their learning. Key-Words: FTIR multi-touch tabletop, multi-touch educational application, collaborative learning 1 Introduction Co-located collaborative learning generally refers to having a small group of learners working together to solve a problem or complete a task, gaining new knowledge in the process. The learners can share ideas, help each other, and contribute solution to the task at hand. In the classroom, co-located collaborative learning can be achieved through specially-designed learning activities, overseen by a teacher, or via computer-based lessons, which can be made interesting with the use of multimedia content. Children, in small groups, working on learning activities and tasks on the computer are found to have more fun, be more dedicated and solve problems faster [1]. However, for a standard computer set-up, a group of children sharing it will also have to share the output and the input means. Depending on the size of the output display and the number of children sharing, this could be an issue, since a standard monitor is too small to be effective. The bigger issue, however, is that the group of children have to share input devices such as the keyboard and mouse, which means the children have to take turns. This could lead to the children competing for control, or the children not having their turns at the input devices getting bored. Using the multi-touch tabletop with specially-designed learning tasks for children overcomes this problem. In contrast with single-input devices of the standard PC, the tabletop allows simultaneous multiple inputs from a group of children, making it ideal for co-located collaborative learning activities. However, commercially-available tabletops are expensive. Although some of the tabletop manufacturers do provide educational applications to go with their hardware products, they can be very costly, and are catered for the needs of the European countries. Specifically, applications focusing on subjects of interest to Asian countries, take, the Malay or Chinese medium as examples, are not supported by these commercial providers. There are a very limited number of educational applications for tabletops written for Asian children, and none have been deployed in Asian countries, perhaps due to the high overall cost of owning such systems. Thus, this paper presents a cost-effective camerabased Multi-touch Tabletop and multimedia-enriched educational application to enhance co-located collaborative learning of Bahasa Malaysia for preschool children. This paper is organized into five sections. The next section provides some background and related works. Section 3 describes the design of the system in this work and Section 4 presents the result of its implementation and discussion of the results. The conclusion is given in Section 5. ISBN:

2 2 Review of Existing Work 2.1 Commercially-available Multi-touch Devices There are multi-touch devices sold off-the-shelf that could, in principle, support co-located collaborative learning activities or tasks. Tablets such as the Apple ipad [2] and the vast variety of Android tablets have multi-touch capabilities and can support such educational applications. However, the ipad and Android tablets such as Motorola Xoom [3] and Samsung Galaxy Tab [4] have displays of about 10 inches at best, and are therefore too small to be effective for group teaching and learning. Furthermore, considering that these devices support at most 2 4 simultaneous touch-points, which are insufficient for collaborative learning, this group of device, therefore, is not suitable for co-collated collaborative learning for children. Popular multi-touch tabletop that is commercially available include the DiamondTouch table, with screen sizes of 32 and 42 inches, and the price is tagged at USD10,000 [5]. Another example of offthe-shelf multi-touch tabletop is the Microsoft Surface platform, which runs on the 40-inch Samsung SUR40 and can be used atop a table or mounted on a wall. It will be available in 2011, for the price of USD7,600 [6]. A more specific commercial solution for education is SMART which provides a range of products for interactive learning that supports collaboration among learners. The SMART Podium is an interactive pen display device which allows the presenter (teacher) to write notations on pre-prepared materials as the lesson is being delivered. However, since it is meant only for presentation and does not support direct co-located collaborative activities, it is also not suitable for the purpose in question. The SMART Board, on the other hand, is an interactive whiteboard with multi-touch capability and digital ink writing, and is large enough to allow multiple learners to use it at the same time. The starting price for this product is US$3,079. The SMART Table is a multi-touch tabletop with a 28-inch display area, and is ideal for multiple users to interact and work together on learning activities. It is currently priced at 4,395 [7]. Although there are commercially-available products that support co-located collaborative learning but the high cost of ownership is a deterrent to their being widely adopted as a teaching tool for schools. 2.2 Multi-touch Educational Applications Lee and Kim [8] proposed the u-table, which is a tabletop interface built to cater for multiple users, providing a cooperative place to share multimedia data. The hardware is able to detect multiple fingertips so that more than one user can use it simultaneously. To support interaction between users, who may sit at any side of the u-table, it includes features such as rotational window, pop-up menu, inertial widget and transformable tabletop. The system promotes intuitive manipulation on objects displayed on the table, convenient communication between devices connected to it, and ease of interaction with the interfaces for the users. CMate, as presented by Maldonado et al. [9], is a hardware-independent application developed to run on the tabletop interface to support learners for collaborative concept mapping. The application combines the individual learner s concept maps, so learners and teachers can gain an understanding of each others knowledge and misconceptions. There are also educational applications that play a more active role in the learning process. TICLE (Tangible Interface for Collaborative Learning Environments) [10] consist of a puzzle application on the tabletop which tracks the users progress. The program will offer assistance such as explanation and/or hints when it detects the need. While focused on multi-touch tabletop technologies and co-located collaborative learning, both the work presented in [8, 9, 10] are not designed specifically for children. SpelLit [11], on the other hand, is an educational application developed to foster literacy skills at elementary schools. It runs on a multi-touch tabletop system called the UniTable and uses the concept of reading by writing, developed by Jurgen Reichen. This application lets children figure out the ways to spell words based on pictures and a given initial sound elements, through game-play. Futura, a game application designed specifically to support the learning of the complexity of sustainable development and land use planning for children between ages 9 and 12 years [12]. The large displays and multi-touch capabilities of the tabletop ISBN:

3 are ideal for game-themed applications for multiple simultaneous players. 3 System Design The aim of this work is to develop a cost-effective camera-based multi-touch tabletop and multi-touch educational application to enhance co-located collaborative learning that allowed multiple children to learn Bahasa Malaysia effectively. 3.1 Design and Implementation of the Multitouch Tabletop To ensure that the display can accommodate multiple users accessing the tabletop simultaneously, it is designed to have a large horizontal writable display of 32 inches which allows users to interact using fingertips or an Infrared (IR) pen. It is capable of detecting single-point touch for selecting and dragging, and multiple fingertips to provide gesture controls for zooming in/out, panning, scaling and rotating. The large display combined with multitouch capability enables children to view and interact with the application together, with ease, as they may all use their fingers on the screen at the same time. FTIR optical technique is used in the tabletop design to achieve multi-touch enabled surface as shown in Figure 1 which consists of an IR camera, an acrylic surface with IR LEDs along its edges, a standard projector, two mirrors, a diffuse-compliant surface and a computer CPU. In order to produce a large display at a reduced height that is suitable for children to access easily, mirrors are added into the design to create a long virtual path from the standard projector to the table surface. The IR LEDs installed along the edges of the surface provide an IRilluminated surface and the IR band-pass camera mounted at the bottom of the setup functions as an optical sensor to differentiate finger touches and projected images on the table surface. Tracing paper coated with silicon is used as a diffuse-compliant surface on top of the acrylic to form the projection surface and proxy to easily frustrate the total internal reflection when touched. The software components of the tabletop system consist of the open-source IR tracking module, Community Core Vision (CCV) available at and OpenCV available at The CCV tracking Figure 1: Hardware Design of the FTIR-based Multitouch Tabletop module gets a video feed from the IR camera, which captures refracted light sources from the surface whenever it is touched. It generates the coordinate and blob size for every detected IR source in the video stream. OpenCV is used to handle the generation of the blob tracking data through processes such as video capturing, background removal, high-pass sharpening, high-pass noisefiltering, brightness amplification and contour tracking. Data output by the CCV are broadcasted as TUIO messages using CCV s OSC libraries either directly to any TUIO-enabled applications or XMLenabled applications via Flash Open Sound Control (FLOSC) [13]. The TUIO UDP data is passed via FLOSC and XML messages are sent to TCP port 3000 that is polled by the application. The received XML messages include the IDs, X and Y coordinates and gesture control events of the touches. 3.2 Design of the Multi-touch Educational Application The educational application developed for this work is designed specifically for children of ages 4 6, to learn Bahasa Malaysia. Children within this range of pre-school age are most curious and eager to explore, thus the multi-touch tabletop interface being much more intuitive than the conventional keyboard-andmouse is expected to appeal to them. The children are able to directly touch on the content providing a more intuitive interface and this is expected to better engage them in the lessons and also prolong their attention span and focus in learning. The educational application emphasizes on rich sounds, colours and ISBN:

4 Figure 2: Design of the Multi-touch Educational Application animated graphics to suit young learners and to engage the children throughout the lessons and enhance their learning experience. Sound events are included on-touch and whenever a correct answer is obtained, to continually engage the children and keep them motivated. The educational application is developed using Flash and receives touch information via TUIO protocol. Figure 2 shows the design of the multi-touch educational application. It is designed in the form of an E-Book, which consists of three main components: the learning modules, gaming modules and testing modules. The learning modules focus on delivery of a lesson, such as word recognition and pronunciation, and grammar skills in Bahasa Malaysia. The gaming modules reinforce the lessons delivered by allowing the children to collaboratively complete the educational games. The testing modules on the other hand, provide a measure of the effectiveness of the learning modules in that it examines how much of the lessons the children have learned and retained. The learning modules of the E-Book consists of a rich collection of pictures, words, audio clips and animation and it is highly interactive with multitouchable interfaces. The combination of these designs is extremely effective in capturing children s attention, invoking their curiosity and encouraging their taking initiative in exploring the modules and therefore, learning. The module is also designed such that every interactive lesson can be repeated as many times as the children wishes, so children can proceed at a pace they feel most comfortable with. Simple tasks such as matching items, filling in the blanks and naming objects make up the testing modules. These tasks are based wholly upon the topics delivered via the learning modules, and are designed to allow children to test their knowledge of the topics repeatedly, until they get everything right. Repetition is crucial in helping children retain the knowledge. The gaming modules support simultaneous access by users such that children can all participate in the game, effectively exploiting the benefits of colocated collaboration and making the task more fun. In addition to the fun element, the game modules are designed to be of the same themes as the learning modules, giving them the additional function of being reinforcements of the lessons delivered. 4 Result The main interface to the multi-touch educational application is shown in Figure 3 where children can choose to interact with the e-book of choice grouped into animals on land, that fly and in the sea. Each of the three different sub-themes consists of a slightly different collection of activities that make up the learning and testing modules of the application. Each activity focuses on a different language skill, through which the children will learn. For instance, the children would be able to learn different types of animals by pairing the pictures to the words and listening to the pronunciations as shown in Figure 4. The children could touch on the animal and the name of the animal would be read out loud. This feature would capture children s attention and helps them to learn the pronunciation of each word, while matching it to the written form. The learning modules also cater for the learning of basic grammar lessons for Bahasa Malaysia where the children would be able to listen to the explanation Figure 3: Main interface of the multi-touch learning application ISBN:

5 Figure 4: Learning Modules Listening to Pronunciation of Words of rule, strengthen it with illustration of pictures and example usage as shown in Figure 5. Once the children go through the learning module, they can move on with the testing module to test the understanding of the knowledge learned in the form of exercises as illustrated in Figure 6. A score is shown when the learners have answered all the questions and touched on the Check button. The testing modules allow repeated attempts, so that the children get multiple chances to get their answers correct. This helps to keep the children motivated for longer periods of time. The game modules consists collection puzzle games of the animals introduced the lessons, which complement the lessons presented in the learning modules. A reference picture would be given, and the pieces of puzzles are randomly placed at the bottom of the display, which can be dragged across the surface and assembled as shown in Figure 7. These puzzle games are designed such that multiple individual pieces of the puzzles can be dragged across the screen simultaneously, in order to allow multiple children to solve them together. This would prevent the more dominant children hogging the Figure 6: Testing Modules Grammar Exercise for Bahasa Malaysia game, resulting in the more passive ones losing interest. The large table surface ensures that all children get a good view of the application and a fair chance to participate. At the completion of each puzzle, the children will be tasked to identify the animal in the picture which they have just assembled. If they answered it correctly, a congratulatory screen will be shown. Otherwise, the correct answer will be provided. There is no limit to the number of games that can be played at any one time, so the children are free to repeat as many times as they wish. The repetition may be helpful to slower children to absorb the lessons. The educational application is installed on the FTIR multi-touch tabletop, and tested in a local preschool as shown in Figure 8. The cost of deployment of the multi-touch tabletop is approximated to be USD 956, which is just a fraction of the cost of the commercial products discussed in section 2.1. Thus, it can be adopted easily by schools to be a part of their curriculum. The children were very enthusiastic and eager to explore the lessons and games deployed on the tabletop. Favourable feedbacks were Figure 5: Learning Modules Grammar Lesson for Bahasa Malaysia Figure 7: Puzzle-Game Modules The Start of a Puzzle ISBN:

6 Figure 8: The Learning Application running on the developed FTIR Multi-touch Tabletop commented by the school teacher in terms of the engagement of the children s attention and focus in their learning. In this respect, the design of the application presented on the multi-touch tabletop has achieved the objective of effectively providing a colocated collaborative learning environment for the pre-school children. 5 Conclusion The developed cost effective FTIR-based multi-touch tabletop and educational applications could possibly enhance the learning curve for pre-school children to learn Bahasa Malaysia. From the initial deployment and observation, it is noticed that the children are able to work together in learning activities such as completing a test or to play educational game on the table surface. This would improve social skills among the children on top of learning. Besides, they can be seen interacting more happily and fun with the learning content using their hands instead of mouse and keyboard. At the same time, positive feedbacks were given by the school teacher on the use of tabletop in teaching. Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the financial supports given by the Multimedia University. References: [1] Plitchta, M., Nischt, M., Joost, G., Rohs, M., Touching Newton: a round multi-touch table for collaborative learning among children, 12 th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, [2] Apple Inc., ipad, [3] Motorola Mobility, Inc., Motorola Xoom, xoom-android-tablet/us-en/overview.html, [4] Samsung, Samsung Galaxy Tab, [5] Dietz, P. and D. Leigh, DiamondTouch: a multi-user touch technology. 14 th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Orlando, Florida, USA, November 2001, pp [6] Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft and Samsung Unveil the Next Generation of Surface, jan11/01-06mssurfacesamsungpr.mspx, [7] SMART Technologies, Education Solutions, lutions, [8] Lee, J., Kim, J., u-table: A Tabletop Interface for Multiple Users, ICCSA 2006, LNCS 3980, 2006, pp [9] Maldonado, R.M., Kay, J., Yacef, K., Collaborative Concept Mapping at the Tabletop, ITS 2010: Teaching & Learning, Saarbrücken, Germany, Nov 7 10, [10] Scarlatos, L. L., Dushkina, Y., Landy, A., TICLE: a Tangible Interace for Collaborative Learning Environments, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, May 15 20, [11] Scharf, F., Günther, S., Winkler, T., Herczeg, M., SpelLit: Development of a Multi-Touch Application to Foster Literacy Skills at Elementary Schools, 40 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Washington, DC, USA, October 27 30, [12] Tanenbaum, J., Antle, A.N., Seaborn, K., Tanenbaum, K., Bevans, A., Wang, S., Futura: Desgining Multi-touch Tabletop Games for Sustainability, GRAND Annual Conference., Ottawa, ON, Canada, June 2 4, 2010 [13] M. Kaltenbrunner, T. Bovermann, R. Bencina and E. Costanza, TUIO: A protocol for tabletop tangible user interfaces, 6th International Workshop on Gesture in Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation, Vannes, France, ISBN: