Visualisations for longitudinal participation, contribution and progress of a collaborative task at the tabletop

One of the challenges for facilitators in collaborative work is that they typically see only the final product of a groups' interactive work. This is a problem as it means that the role of each individual may be hard to determine. This paper proposes a set of visualisations which aim to give teachers insights into longitudinal participation of each group member, an indication of the extent of each learner's contribution and the building process of the group product in terms of overall activity towards a good solution. We exploit the affordances of tabletops to capture the data in order to infer these visualisations. We evaluate these by assessing whether facilitators could answer key questions about aspects of groups. Key contributions of the paper are the design of new visualisations, results of their evaluation and the implementation of a tabletop concept mapping application which was carefully designed to both support collaboration and capture of the history of the collaborative process.