Seeing Clearly Through Ink in Computer Science Courses

We conducted four typical undergraduate computer science classroom exercises in a laptop course (each student has a personal laptop computer). Students worked on problems they were given and submitted their solutions interactively using a Web-based tool called MessageGrid. Students worked on the exercises in pairs but submitted individually. Each pair of students shared a WACOM tablet which each student could use to submit Ink solutions to the problems. The result was an interesting blend of a classroom format of reduced lecture and increased student interactivity, software-supported interaction between instructor and students, team-dynamics, and keyed versus Ink solutions to the exercises. A survey was given to the students asking them to assess the learning experience. This paper describes the exercises, the classroom environment, shows examples of student submissions, and presents and discusses the survey results. We end with conclusions and plans for future work.