Interactive Lessons is a presentation tool for teachers, allowing them to involve students in a presentation. By dragging and dropping elements, teachers can create compelling, instructional workspaces that include dynamic student-based content. The workspaces can include images and words, and can also include one or more calculator screens. In addition, Interactive Lessons allows the teacher to review the steps a student has performed on a calculator, including the sequence of key presses.
IL allows students to participate more extensively during a class session, and increases the level of participation for the class as a whole. Although the teacher is given complete control over the presentation, the students are given an opportunity to directly drive the big screen display, giving them more of an impact on the class discussion.
Interactive Lessons was my thesis project in HCI at Carnegie Mellon University. The project was sponsored by Texas Instruments.
This was a group project, made up of five people - two computer scientists, two psychologists, and one designer (me). All of us shared the various roles on this project, but I was primarily responsible for the interaction and flow of the software and the visual aesthetics of the user interface. I also participated in the nine months of iterative user research, design, and testing that went on to support this software.
