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Designing hand gesture interfaces for easing students participation from their spot

Abstract:

The lack of interactivity in the classroom has been identified as an important barrier to make the learning processes more effective. Although several instructional strategies and dynamics have been proposed, including the use of supporting technology, the problem remains open. This paper explores the feasibility of using touchless hand gestures (THG) during lectures in order to promote and ease the students' participation, and thus increasing their interactivity. Particularly, this work focuses on supporting the students' participation from their own spot in the classroom, as a strategy to help them feel comfortable and increase their participation during lectures. After conducting a literature review, no proposals or guidelines helping developers create THG-based applications to support such a participation strategy for the classroom scenario were found. Therefore, the authors used the literature review and their own experience to define a set of design aspects that should be considered when developing this type of applications. The suitability of this design guideline was evaluated with a user study with two applications. The quantitative and qualitative results show the students' participation from their spot could be feasible of being used in practice and it could increase the interaction during lectures. Moreover, the proposed design guidelines are shown to be suitable to support the development of these applications.