Project Specfication

PROJECT SPECFICATION

Background Information

"Without the cooperation of its members society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible.... It was not an advantageous individual here and there who did so, but the group. In human societies the individuals who are most likely to survive are those who are best enabled to do so by their group."
(Ashley Montagu)

Cooperative learning is one of the best researched of all teaching strategies. The results show that students who have opportunities to work collaboratively, learn faster and more efficiently, have greater retention, and feel more positive about the learning experience.

Joseph Novak, a Cornell University professor who developed the idea in the 1960’s about Conceptual mapping. Conceptual maps are visual representation of graph like structure that used by the teachers to allow the children represents the knowledge consists of concepts and the relationship between them. These maps are hierarchical like structures.

In the Concept Mapping process, the first step is the identification of the problem, after identification the focus question are identifying and listing the most important or “general” concepts that are associated with the topic, ordering the concepts from top to bottom in the mapping field, means that the general concepts are on the top in the hierarchy and less general are at the bottom of tree. Then adding and labeling linking phrases. Once the preliminary Concept has been built, cross-links are identified and added, and a review of the map for completeness and correctness is performed.

Motivation for the Project

The motivation of this project is to facilitate the development of tabletop application that allows a group of students or more to cooperatively develop conceptual maps which containing all necessary features of collaboration and knowledge sharing. The new system will bring all necessary functions for the students to collaboratively interact with each other on a tabletop to build concept maps

Project Goals and Scope

The goal of this project is develop a Tabletop application in “C #” and “Microsoft s wpf (Windows Presentation Foundation). The application allows a group of students or more to cooperatively develop conceptual maps on the tabletop. The developed application will provide different features to the students to create, edit, and delete concept maps on the tabletop.

How Results must be evaluated

When the application of tabletop will be ready, we will take different tests with the group of students in order to check that up to what extent they will create concept maps on tabletop.

Related Works

There are lot of research going on about the collaborative management of digital maps. Like TabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape andsize, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.The first case of study has been tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach.