Next Generation Handheld Graphics Edutainment for Learning in Adaptive Student Centric Environments: Constraints and Benefits

Abstract

Graphics is being used as an effective tool in visual communication, e.g. Second Life, Google city scene and Microsoft scene reconstruction. It is already changing social, cultural, commercial and educational environments. 3D representations complement text and 2D images because they provide a depth perspective, enhancing user experience for understanding abstract and complex concepts, as well as inducing the feeling of immersion. These benefits have led to the adoption of 3D content in a game-like environment for educational and other applications. While main stream multimedia technology has started to revolutionize the way content is captured and delivered to households (e.g., multimedia Television, 3DTV, for entertainment), mobile multimedia content is anticipated to emerge in parallel and be more and more pervasive in day-to-day life. Streamlined and cutting edge graphical content with increasingly rich semantics will soon be widely available on mobile devices. Keeping these emerging and fast growing technologies in mind, this paper focuses on investigating the constraints and benefits of handheld graphics in education, in particular on supporting curriculum designers and teachers to deliver high quality learning environment to users. We have implemented a handheld edutainment prototype system, which has been used as a test-bed by a group of teachers. From our evaluation we observe that while the education community can benefit from mobile graphics on handheld in a number of aspects, there are obvious constraints that prevent extension and immediate adoption of the technology in adaptive edutainment. We anticipate that developers will be able to design more effective student centric graphics edutainment learning systems on handheld devices by utilizing our findings.