Extending tabletop application design to the classroom

While a number of guidelines exist for the design of learning applications that target a single group working around an interactive tabletop, the same cannot be said for the design of applications intended for use in multi-tabletops deployments in the classroom. Accordingly, a number of these guidelines for single-tabletop settings need to be extended to take account of both the distinctive qualities of the classroom and the particular challenges of having various groups using the same application on multiple tables simultaneously. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of designs for small-group multi-tabletop collaborative learning activities in the wild. We use distributed cognition as a framework to analyze the small number of authentic multi-tabletop deployments and help characterize the technological and educational ecology of these classroom settings. Based on previous research on single-tabletop collaboration, the concept of orchestration, and both first-hand experience and second-hand accounts of the few existing multiple-tabletop deployments to date, we develop a three-dimensional framework of design recommendations for multi-tabletop learning settings.