CarettaKids

We have developed a city planning simulator for CarettaKids.

When students move, add or remove pieces (houses, factories, trees) on the sensing board, the financial and environmental effects of the manipulation are displayed graphically.

The exact same simulation can also be done on students' PDAs. City plans designed on PDAs can be "projected" onto the sensing board, for other students to examine.

This way, students can move back and forth between shared and personal spaces, testing their individual ideas using PDAs and discussing the results using the sensing board.

The backgrounds of CarettaKids is related to our previous systems called Epro and Epro2 (see the publications below) that allow children to manipulate physical pieces on the sensing board to conduct environmental simulations. Through the evaluations in elementary schools, following problems have been identified:

When multiple children manipulated pieces on the sensing board at the same time, they could not always understand how their individual manipulations on the board changed simulation results. This was because their manipulations were simultaneously visualized as the simulation results and children could not easily find the relation between each manipulation and the corresponding result.
Some children who had a reserved nature or were not so confident of their own idea often hesitated to manipulate pieces on the sensing board. They did not want to show the idea to other children on the board visible to all the children.

CarettaKids has been developed in collaboration with schoolteachers in order to solve these problems.

The evaluations of CarettaKids have been conducted in a Japanese elementary school. The analyses of the evaluations indicated that

Children could participate in their learning by using personal and shared spaces interchangeably
Children could easily show their ideas devised on their own personal spaces to other children by displaying them on the shared space. Then, they improved the ideas through discussions on the shared space.

We will conduct more intensive analyses of how CarettaKids supports children's externalization and reflection by integrating their shared and personal spaces.

Major Publications :

Sugimoto, M., Kusunoki, F., Hashizume, H.: A System for Supporting Group Activities with a Sensor-embedded Board, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C, (2006, in press).

Sugimoto, M., Kusunoki, F., Inagaki, S., Yamaguchi, E.: Enhancing Externalization and Reflection by Integrating Personal and Shared Workspaces, in Proceedings of ECSCW2005, Paris, France, pp.117-119 (2005).

Sugimoto, M., Kusunoki, F., Inagaki, S., Takatoki, K., Yoshikawa, A.: A System for Supporting Collaborative Learning with Networked Sensing Boards, Systems and Computers in Japan, , Vol.35, No.9, pp.39-50 (2004).

Sugimoto, M., Hosoi,K., Hashizume, H.: Caretta: A System for Supporting Face-to-Face Collaboration by Integrating Personal and Shared Spaces, In Proceedings of CHI2004, Vienna, Austria, pp.41-48 (2004).

Sugimoto, M., Kusunoki,F, Inagaki, S, Takatoki, K, Yoshikawa, A: Design of a System and a Curriculum to Support Group Learning for School Children, In Designing for Change in Networked Learning Environments, Kluwer Academic Publisher, pp.303-312 (2003).

Sugimoto, M., Kusunoki, F., and Hashizume, H. Design of an Interactive System for Group Learning Support. In Proceeding of ACM DIS2002, London, UK, pp. 50-55 (2002).

Kusunoki, F., Sugimoto, M., Hashizume, H.: A Support System for Music Learning through Collaboration, In Proc. of Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL2002), Boulder, CO, pp. 491-492 (2002).

Sugimoto, M., Kusunoki, F., and Hashizume, H.: E2board: An Electronically Enhanced Board for Games and Group Activity Support, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Human Factors Design, Singapore, pp.238-245 (2001).

Kusunoki, F., Sugimoto, M., Hashizume, H.: Toward the Integration of Physical and Virtual Worlds for Supporting Group Learning, In Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives, Springer-Verlag, pp. 224-235 (2000).

Kusunoki, F., Sugimoto, M., Hashizume, H.: A System for Supporting Group Learning that Enhances Interactions, In Proc. of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL'99), Stanford, CA, pp.323-327 (1999).