Who did what? Who said that? Collaid: an environment for capturing traces of collaborative learning at the tabletop

Tabletops have the potential to provide new ways to support collaborative learning generally and, more specifically, to aid people in learning to collaborate more effectively. To achieve this potential, we need to gain understanding of how to design tabletop environments so that they capture relevant information about collaboration processes so that we can make it available in a form that is useful for learners, their teachers and facilitators. This paper draws upon research in computer supported collaborative learning to establish a set of principles for the design of a tabletop learning system. We then show how these have been used to design our Collaid (Collaborative Learning Aid) environment. Key features of this system are: capture of multi-modal data about collaboration in a tabletop activity using a microphone array and a depth sensor; integration of these data with other parts of the learning system; transforming the data into visualisations depicting the processes that occurred during the collaboration at the table; and sequence mining of the interaction logs. The main contributions of this paper are: our design guidelines to build the Collaid environment and the demonstration of its use in a collaborative concept mapping learning tool applying data mining and visualisations of collaboration.