With this crude understanding of the expected population of users for Classroom 2000 prototypes, we attempted to construct prototypes of systems to support different teaching styles for classes that we were currently teaching. To date, we have supported three different courses within the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Details on each of these classes is summarized in Table 1.
We built three separate prototypes to suit different teaching styles
and to allow us to experiment with different technology in the hands
of the students and teacher. One prototype used Apple
MessagePads
for note-taking and another used pen-based PCs. One
class used an electronic whiteboard (the LiveBoard) while others
simply used a projector attached to a workstation that the instructor
used to display slides or notes.
To control the engineering problem of designing and maintaining distinct prototypes, we devised an overall common architecture or organization that each prototype would obey. The inspiration for this common architecture came from the movie industry, in which the development of a single movie is divided into three distinct phases -- pre-production, live recording and post-production. Table 1 summarizes the main differences between the prototypes by the activities and technology used in the various phases of production. We will now describe what each of these phases means in the context of our development.
Future Computing Environments