A Study of Digital Ink Student Artifacts to Inform the Scaling of a Classroom Interaction System

This paper studies digital ink artifacts students produced in the classroom and how instructors could use these artifacts in support of classroom instruction. Currently, instructor use of student-produced artifacts is limited by the cognitive load of real-time review and analysis during class. The goal of the study is to evaluate, in the context of a TabletPC-based classroom interaction system, whether clustering techniques have the potential to assist instructors in this task. We examine student ink artifacts to determine whether they could be naturally grouped into categories that instructors find useful when discussing student work. We establish that grouping student artifacts plays a major role in how instructors use them in class, and that the artifacts often have an underlying grouping structure. This paper looks at the complexity of algorithms for grouping and also identifies several challenges that arise in analyzing student artifacts.