414 Educational Software Employing Group Competition on an Interactive Electronic Whiteboard Yoko Otsuki Department of Computer, Information and Communication Sciences Tokyo University of Agriculture & Technology, Japan yhoko@hands.ei.tuat.ac.jp Hirokazu Bandoh, Naoki Kato, Bipin Indurkhya & Masaki Nakagawa Abstract: This paper presents the design and evaluation of an educational software employing group competition using a large interactive electronic whiteboard. Group competition is a useful method to cultivate originality and communication skills. Sharing the same space and the same large screen, and face-to-face communication with others are very important for group competition. We have designed a kanji pairing software package using the interactive electronic whiteboard. Through experimental use of the application at two elementary schools, we confirmed the potential of this software to motivate children to learn and the necessity to adjust competitive factors according to children’s personalities. Moreover, the children kept their concentration and the teacher could get feedback of children’s study process. Therefore, the interactive electronic whiteboard and group competitive software can be effectively employed for classroom learning. Introduction In recent years, many schools are making an effort to incorporate computers into teaching and the field of CAI has developed several software systems to assist in this task. More recently, CSCL systems have also been proposed, which allow students to collaborate with each other in a group (Strijbos, 2001). However, little attention has been given to the role of competition in learning. While an undue emphasis on competition may be stressful, a certain level of competition is useful to motivate and inspire students. If the competition is between teams, it also fosters cooperation among team members and promotes improvisation. With proper supervision and guidance, the teacher can help the development of individual students, and students get a sense of achievement and feel encouraged to study further. Introducing computers into group competition-based teaching reduces the time needed by the teacher for preparation, which in turn allows the teacher to pay more attention to the students and to monitor their growth and development. The teacher can check the students’ answers and their results can be discussed in the group to encourage the students’ ideas naturally. The interactive electronic whiteboard has previously been used in classroom teaching, and has been shown to possess many advantages. The electronic whiteboard is a large whiteboard with a pen-input tablet, which works like a normal chalk and eraser. We have already developed several useful interfaces for the electronic whiteboard (Nakagawa, 1999). More recently, we have been working on incorporating the electronic whiteboard into classroom teaching to integrate the advantages of traditional classroom teaching with those of using computers in the classroom (Bandoh, 2000, Otsuki, 2001). In this study we focus on developing a competition-based study environment using the electronic whiteboard in a classroom. We believe that the use of an electronic whiteboard fosters teamwork and face-to-face communication. Towards this goal, we present the design of competition-based educational software for learning kanji pairs. We also describe how it allows competitive elements to be adjusted depending on the personality of the students in a class, and how it assists the teacher in directing the flow of teaching. Further, we studied the effectiveness of the software in monitoring the learning progress of the students and their abilities to improvise and cooperate.