Supporting the Assessment of Collaborative Design Activities in Multi-tabletop Classrooms

The present study describes a proposed multitable top system for supporting collaborative database design activities in the classroom. Additionally, two experiments were conducted to evaluate students´ and teachers´ perceptions of the proposed system potential on aspects of group work assessment such as: ease of grading individuals as well as groups, equality of students´ participation, and, capability to accurately reflect individual contributions. Ten educators and 22 students from a Computer Science program participated in the experiments. The findings of this work show that the use of the proposed system impacted positively on the educators´ perception about the ease of grading individuals and groups. In addition, distinguishing users in collaborative group work is key for decreasing social-loafing. The results suggest that the proposed system does have potential to support a better group work assessment.