Touch, drag, learn
Research by computer scientists, biologists, and cognitive psychologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts suggests that collaborative touch-screen games have value beyond play. Two games, developed with the goal of teaching important evolutionary concepts, were tested on families in a busy museum environment, and on pairs of college students. In both cases, the games made the process of learning difficult material engaging and collaborative. The findings were presented last month at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction conference. The games take advantage of the multi-touch-screen tabletop, which is essentially a desk-size tablet computer. In a classroom or a museum, several users can gather around the table and use it simultaneously, working on independent problems or collaborating on a single project. The table can also interact with objects such as cards or blocks that are placed on its surface. The new research moves beyond the novelty of the system, however,...