SBIR Phase I: Interactive Multi-Touch Collaborative Table for Classrooms

Templeman Automation (TA) and Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO), propose using TA's open-architecture touch-table for STEM educational applications. The ?STEM-Table? applies multi-touch computing to collaborative learning, project-based engineering education, individual-within-group skills assessment, and across-sciences visualization and augmented reality. These applications will leverage students? natural fascination towards touch interfaces and direct them through STEM educational goals using multi-touch-specific curriculum modules. With the benefit of SBIR funding, a multi-touch toolset and activities/curriculum will be developed that are designed within the multi-touch table environment to provide augmented science activities for STEM education. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is that STEM-Table (1) brings high-end interactive experiences to diverse classrooms; (2) enables out-of-the-box (engineering) and end-result (instruction) science learning; and (3) will provide a new paradigm for collaborative STEM activities while providing teacher workload reduction and targeted skills assessment. The intellectual merit of the proposed research lies in the melding of the multi-touch table environment with the educational experience of the CEEO. Working together, a new model of classroom interaction will be created to provide the access, supports, and scaffolds that students need to make sense of science and become excited by STEM's creative opportunities.