Interactive Technologies Research Group

The Interactive Technology Center, explores various technologies within the Computer Science domains in the aims of exploring Computer Interaction, Innovation and ways in which the digital and the physical could be merged together for effective computer interactions.

Featured Projects

TangiBoard: A toolkit to reduce the implementation burden of Tangible User Interfaces in education

Publication

The use of Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) as an educational technology has gained sustained interest over the years with common agreement on its innate ability to engage and intrigue students in active-learning pedagogies. Whilst encouraging results have been obtained in research, the widespread adoption of TUI architectures is still hindered by a myriad of implementation burdens imposed by current toolkits. To this end, this paper presents an innovative TUI toolkit: TangiBoard, which enables the deployment of an interactive TUI system using low-cost, and presently available educational technology. Apart from curtailing setup costs and technical expertise required for adopting TUI systems, the toolkit provides an application framework to facilitate system calibration and development integration with GUI applications. This is enabled by a robust computer vision application that tracks a contributed passive marker set providing a range of tangible interactions to TUI frameworks. The effectiveness of this toolkit was evaluated by computer systems developers with respect to alternate toolkits for TUI design. Open-source versions of the TangiBoard toolkit together with marker sets are provided online through research license

Exposing Knowledge: Providing a Real-Time View of the Domain Under Study for Students

Publication

With the amount of information that exists online, it is impossible for a student to find relevant information or stay focused on the domain under study. Research showed that search engines have deficiencies that might prevent students from finding relevant information. In this research, we are proposing a solution that takes the personal search history of a student into consideration and provides a holistic view of the domain under study. A bag-of-words for each searched keyword is created and used to query third-party APIs to find relevant papers and construct a Word Cloud. To archive this we built a user interface to present the aggregated results to the student. In order to evaluate our approach, we used some of the commonly used datasets and compared our results to existing research

Designing a Table-Top Tangible User Interface System for Higher Education

Publication

Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) have garnered significant interest in the past years as a potential solution to embed smarter technologies for education. The intrinsic ability of this technology to engage and intrigue students in active learning pedagogies has recently been successfully proven across all ages using various techniques. Predominantly amongst the effective technologies, has been the development of tabletop approaches. However, these have mostly been bespoke implementations that lack proper formalisation. To this end, this paper construes the requirements to successfully implement TUI technology within higher educational contexts and proposes the design considerations for the smart adaptation of this technology. Following the implementation of the proposed smart system, the developed TUI design was evaluated within an undergraduate university programme for its effectiveness in teaching and learning object-oriented concepts. The obtained results illustrate a significant enhancement of student-experience during utilisation of such technology and quantitively outline the designs potentiation to convey complex concepts in higher education. Detailed blueprints of the proposed architecture are openly available on: http://itc.mdx.edu.mt.

Featured Projects

TangiBoard: A toolkit to reduce the implementation burden of Tangible User Interfaces in education

Exposing Knowledge: Providing a Real-Time View of the Domain Under Study for Students

Designing a Table-Top Tangible User Interface System for Higher Education

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