Durham Uni Smartdesk envisages the classroom of the future

“The system will also boost equal access in school. In IT, we have found that males have been the dominant actors - interactive classrooms will encourage more females to take part in lessons. It will also enable more disabled students to participate in lessons and allow more personalized learning.”

A single work-desk can operate as a set of individual work spaces and/or a large screen allowing students to cooperate on a task. The software will be used to link everything together in a fully interactive classroom system of desks and smartboards.

Teachers will be able to instantly display examples of good work by students on the main smart-board; tasks could also be set for each individual desk. Numeracy tasks could include exercises where pupils have to split a restaurant bill by sliding visual representations of money into a group space.

After testing the system with students of all ages, the software will be available to schools for free as open source code.

TEL in Computing is the largest funded research study to look at multi-touch interactive systems for education. £1.5 million has been awarded to Durham researchers who will design the system and software, and test it with students from primary and secondary schools, and university students over the next 4 years.

Dr. Andrew Hatch from Durham’s Technology-Enhanced Learning Research Group adds: “It changes the move-to-use principle; instead the computer becomes part of the desk. It’s a practical change that will provide a creative interface for life-long learning for all students!”

The Computing Department at Durham University leads TEL and England's only Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in Computer Science, called Active Learning in Computing (ALiC). This centre seeks to facilitate a shift towards far higher levels of active student engagement, where knowledge is obtained by sharing, problem-solving and creating, rather than by passive listening. Providing novel facilities and encouraging new ways of working will be a central focus.

The Active Learning in Computing research is funded by the EPSRC - Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; the ESRC - Economic and social research council, and the TLRP - Teaching and learning research programme.

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