Lucky British Students Get To Test Super Cool Interactive Desks!

A group of lucky 8-10 year olds have been involved in a super-exciting experiment - To see if replacing traditional pencil and paper with hi-tech interactive desks would help improve their math skills! The children have been using the interesting technology for 3 years.  But before we tell you the result, let’s talk about the new desks…

 Britain’s Durham University and SynergyNet research projects thought of the product and aimed at enhancing classroom learning through technology, it involved 400 students across 12 schools in North East Britain. The interactive desks were fitted with interesting software that responded to touch-based commands enabled by vision systems that could detect infrared light. The teacher obviously needs to see the work that the children have done so, the desks were wired to a Smart Board, which allowed the teacher to assign math problems for the students to solve solo or as a group.

 

That’s not all; the interactive board gets better... The educator could interactively assign different problems to different groups and send one group's answer to another, to see if they agreed. Also, a smart feed provided the educator with instant feedback, which enabled him/her to assist students that were struggling with a concept, while allowing the rest of the group to continue forging ahead. Plus, if the whole class are having problems…  The teacher could simply post it on the whiteboard and explain it to them at the same time. Though the study was used exclusively for math, the desks could easily be used to teach other subjects as well.
 

As a result after looking at the desks, they revealed what most of you could have predicted by simply looking at the desks - 45% of the test students improved their math skills as opposed to just 16% when the same lessons were taught using traditional methods.

But don’t throw your pen and pencil away just yet because… these desks are not about to come to your school anytime soon. This is because it’s new and cool, also they are currently too expensive to go mainstream and they take a lot of time to set up. Even though 400 lucky students were able to keep theirs as a reward for taking part in this rather 'grueling' study!