Tablet PC in Software Engineering Lectures

Tablet PC impact in Software Engineering classes evaluation

Recently we have used Tablet PC in Software Engineering lectures. Our ideia was to use Tablet PCs along with UW Classroom Presenter software, allowing the professor to apply some UML drawing exercises to the students. Examples of their works may be found in the data section.

We were also interested in the impact of this type of class, as it was one of the first experiencies with lectures using Tablet PCs in Unicamp. For this we have ellaborated a survey for the students. It contained 10 questions and a free comentary space. The survey asked questions regarding to participation, ideas organization, Tablet likeness, students participation, confort among others.

Our first survey revelead some students impressions that were in tune with our current Presenter augmentations. Students asked for features like:

possibility to use some UML modeling tool during the lectures;

tools for drawing primitives like lines, squares, circles and text boxes

keyboard text input(Presenter 2 lacked this feature)

We had screen capture feature working at the moment, so we decided to execute other lectures in different classes, allowing them to use the new feature, and measure it's impact. Our screen capture feature consists of permiting the students to get a snapshot of their working area and import it directly to a new slide in Presenter. Besides being a simple feature, screen capture allowed the students to work with any drawing application they liked, in this case the main choice was JUDE/Community, a freeware UML design tool. Figure 1.a shows a student solution without using screen capture and figure 1.b shows a solution using screen capture feature. In both cases the solutions were submitted to professor and graded. In data section there are some works submitted by the students and graded by the professor.

(a) without screen capture	(b) with screen capture
Figure 1 - Student Submissions

This combined use showed a great improvement in student impressions of the Tablet PC usage in lectures, mainly because it allowed the use of a collaborative tool, improving the interaction between the professor and the students, and at the same time it permitted the students to work in a productive enviroment for the task they were working on, mainting their mental model on the subject. Several students still used the pen to design their solutions, but they have used the Tablet PC in a open position, allowing them to use the keyboard ou the touchpad also.

Students impressions

We gathered student impressions applying a survey with ten questions to them. The question answers were all in a Likert's scale, writed with the proper words for each question. Full surveys reports can be obtained in the data section, link reports. It contains xls files containg all the answers we collected per students, graded from 1 to 5. Some questions required comparison between "tradictional" lectures and the ones with the Tablet PCs. In some cases lower means a better impression, we will clarify this cases shortly. All classes contained from 40 to 55 students, divided in groups of between 2 and 4 participants, with free choice. The questionary questions were the following:

1. How distracted/concentrated were you during lectures? (Very distracted - Very concentrated)
2. How confortable were you during lectures? (Very unconfortable - Very confortable)
3. How do you compare your individual participation in group? (Much less - Much more)
4. How do you compare your group participation in the lectures? (Much less - Much more)
5. How do you compare your ideas organization? (Very disorganized - Very organized)
6. How do you compare your access to professor for clarifying doubts during class? (Much worse - Much better)
7. Your adaptation to the environment was... (Very hard - Very easy)
8. I would like to attend to other lectures using Tablet PCs (Strongly disagree - Strongly agree)
9. Among your group, you Tablet PC usage time was... (Very little - Very much)
10. Paper/pen and whiteboard are preferred over Tablet PCs (Strongly disagree - Strongly agree)

Full reports are available in the data section. Soon we will post a brief analysis and results charts in this page.

Future work

In construction.