Facilitating Collaborative Learning on a Multitouch Tabletop

The characteristics of multitouch tabletops, such as large interactive surfaces and simultaneous multiple-user input, can afford collaborative behaviours. Although multitouch tabletop applications are becoming popular in education, such applications themselves do not always promote effective collaboration and learning. Many aspects need to be taken into consideration to ensure effective and productive learning on multitouch tabletops. We argue that agent technologies have the potential to facilitate collaborative learning on multitouch tabletops by providing adaptive feedback at an appropriate time with suitable modality. This potential has not been fully explored in the research communities. This paper presents a generic agent framework for facilitating collaborative learning on multitouch tabletops. We use a math learning game on a multitouch tabletop as an example of implementing the framework.