Paper Reading#2 Hands on Math

Hands on Math: page based multi touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving

authors: Robert Zeleznik, Andrew Bragdon, Ferdi Adeputra, Hsu-Sheng Ko

They are currently PHD students at Brown University

This was presented in New York during the UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium

Summery:

Hypothesis:

-If CAS tools were driven by direct, multi-touch manipulation and digital ink within free-form note taking environment, people would learn more effectively

Methods:

Methods used to implement the device:

gestures

-bezel gestures

-page creation by swiping 2 fingers

-panning bar- swiping up from bezel to see desktop

-under the rock menus

-menu that shows up when moving an object

-touch activated pen gestures

-using light pen and gestures to perform tasks

-widget appears when recognizing a pen gesture

-ex. inserting space, pasting, etc

-touch manipulations

-manipulate expression with gestures

-visual feed back

folding

-pinching a margin of page to fold away part of a problem

palm prints

-non-dominant hand acts to select various items (customizable)

Method of testing the participants:

participants were to complete a set of tasks (perform mathematical operations, manipulate graphic, manipulate page content with TAP gestures, etc)

the participants were told to think out loud during their tasks

participants were permitted to perform more actions to play with the system

Results:

-participants had little difficulty manipulating and writing pages although they experienced difficulty and awkwardness of bi-manual interactions and certain gestures (page creation/deletion)

-ability of the system to support free-form note taking, symbolic and numerical computation, graphing, and function transformation all “without” a UI led participants to conclude that the system has great potential

-most limiting factor came from the very unportable form factor of the hardware and the low quality of the light pen

-Participants felt that bi-manual interaction was very unnatural. If bi-manual interaction greatly exceeds performance benefit gained, then uni-manual interaction would be preferred

-Pilot studies indicate that, after refinement, a mature version of Hands-On Math would be a desirable tool for scientific and academic note-taking

Discussion:

I believe that this device has much potential in terms of allowing students or scientists to more effectively compute math in a more efficient fashion