Experiences with a Tablet PC Based Lecture Presentation System in Computer Science Courses Richard Anderson University of Washington anderson@cs.washington.edu Steven A. Wolfman University of Washington wolf@cs.washington.edu Ruth Anderson University of Virginia ruth@cs.virginia.edu Tammy VanDeGrift University of Washington tammy@cs.washington.edu Beth Simon University of San Diego bsimon@sandiego.edu Ken Yasuhara University of Washington yasuhara@cs.washington.edu ABSTRACT Computer science instructors frequently teach using slides displayed with a computer and a data projector. This has many advantages, e.g., ability to present prepared materials and ease of switching the display to a development environment during mid- presentation. However, existing computer-based presentation systems severely limit flexibility in delivery, hindering instructors extemporaneous adaptation of their presentations to match their audiences. One major limitation of computer-based systems is lack of support for high-quality handwriting over slides, as with overhead projectors and other manual presentation systems. We developed and deployed Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC-based presentation system that (1) combines the advantages of existing computer-based and manual presentation systems and (2) builds on these systems, introducing novel affordances. Classroom Presenter has been used in 25 Computer Science courses at three universities. In this paper we describe the system, summarize results from its deployment, and detail several novel uses of the system by instructors in computer science courses. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3 [Computers and Education]: General General Terms Human Factors Keywords Classroom Presentation, Tablet PC, Digital Ink 1. INTRODUCTION Our tools affect our teaching, not only increasing our efficiency at classroom tasks [9] but also opening up qualitatively different modes of interaction for the classroom [8]. Our research goal, then, is to design new tools for the classroom to enhance interactions among the participants: maintaining the advantages of existing technology, assuming the advantages of older technologies, and forging new affordances for the classroom. There are two sides to this approach: improving presentation tools to give more flexibility in delivering the lecture and introducing mechanisms to support interaction between student and instructor devices. In this paper, we concentrate primarily on the former by describing a system that we have developed for delivering a lecture from the Tablet PC and for displaying the instructional materials on multiple machines. The distributed architecture of the system makes it an entry point into interacting with student devices. A variety of computer-based and manual classroom presentation systems are currently available, each having advantages and disadvantages. Among computer-based systems, the most common is projecting slides using a data projector. Advantages of such systems include the ability to structure material in advance, prepare high quality examples and illustrations, and easily share and reuse material [3]. CS instructors especially benefit from the ability to switch conveniently between slides and web content or a development environment. Computer-based systems are also well-suited for archiving and transmitting presentations, e.g., for distances courses. However, these advantages come at the expense of flexibility during presentation  especially the capacity to adjust the lecture based on audience reaction. Unlike computer-based presentation systems, many manual systems (including overhead projectors and document cameras) support high quality handwriting over slides, enabling the instructor to augment prepared materials with supplemental text or diagramming. These affordances are particularly useful in CS, where diagramming appears in many levels of instruction: from updating data structures in an introductory course to depicting a distributed algorithm protocol in an advanced theory course. We have developed and deployed Classroom Presenter, 1 a presentation system that combines the advantages of existing computer-based systems with the flexibility of the handwriting capability offered by manual systems. Running on a Tablet PC, a 1 The software is available free for educational and research use from http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCSE04, March 37, 2004, Norfolk, Virginia, USA. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-798-2/04/0003$5.00.