The final version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the 2002 Mobile Human Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 306-310). Pisa, Italy. ArtemisExpress: A Case Study in Designing Handheld Interfaces for an Online Digital Library Kathleen Luchini, Chris Quintana, Elliot Soloway University of Michigan, 3111 IST Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA {kluchini, quintana, soloway}@umich.edu Abstract. Learner-Centered Design (LCD) is an approach to building software that supports students as they engage in unfamiliar activities and learn about a new area. LCD has been successfully used to support students using desktop computers for a variety of learning activities, and in this paper we discuss new work to extend LCD to the design of educational software for handheld computers. We discuss some of the challenges of designing handheld software and present a case study of ArtemisExpress, a tool that supports learners using handheld computers for online research. 1 Introduction Learner-Centered Design (LCD) is an emerging technique that extends traditional user-centered design (UCD) techniques to address the unique challenges of building technology that can support learning. While UCD methods typically focus on making more usable software to support the work of expert computer users, LCD techniques focus on developing software that provides learners with the supports they need to learn about the content, tasks, and activities of the new domain they are exploring. LCD principles have been used to develop software tools that support learning activities as diverse as modeling complex systems [1], conducting online research [2] and using the scientific method to explore questions about the environment [3]. While LCD tools such as these have been successful in helping students learn about a variety of subjects and activities, in order for students to gain the full benefits of LCD software they must have access to computer tools wherever and whenever their learning activities take place. Mobile handheld computers, such as PalmOS and Pocket PC devices, offer new opportunities to provide learners with one-to-one computer-to-student access. These devices provide students with “ready-at-hand” access to the tools and information they need for a variety of learning activities [4]. By extending the principles of LCD to the design of handheld software, we hope to build learning tools that can support students wherever and whenever learning happens – whether students are outside studying the local stream or in the classroom using their personal handhelds to find information online to contribute to a group discussion. In this paper we discuss an initial effort to extend LCD techniques to the development of ArtemisExpress, a handheld tool to support learners in conducting online research. 2 Learner-Centered Design Traditional User-Centered Design (UCD) techniques focus on developing efficient, usable computer tools to support the work of experts. Since experts are by definition knowledgeable about their fields, UCD methods typically try to make computer tools that help experts complete familiar work more productively [5]. A tool designed for experts is not generally usable for learners, however, since learners do not have the background knowledge or experience necessary to use the experts’ tool correctly or productively [6]. In addition to their lack of experience, learners are often un-motivated to learn or to work, and individual students have different learning styles and paces [6]. The Learner-Centered Design (LCD) approach has evolved to address these unique learner needs by developing educational software that is not only usable, but that can also help people learn new skills and information. To address learners’ unique needs for support, LCD approaches typically include a variety of scaffolds. Scaffolds are temporary supports that provide learners with the additional assistance they need in order to mindfully engage in unfamiliar work [7]. A variety of scaffolding techniques are commonly used in classrooms, such as when a teacher provides coaching to help students complete a task or models a new process for students before asking them to try the work on their own. Scaffolding techniques have also been successfully incorporated into desktop software tools such as Model-It [1], which uses a series of prompts to guide students through the process of building and testing dynamic models of complex environments such as local ecosystems. The scaffolds in Model-It are designed to fade away over time as learners gain knowledge and learn to complete the task without the scaffold’s support; this fading allows the Model-It interface to adapt as the learners’ needs change over time.