Paper Reading #2: Hands-on Math

Hands-on Math

by: Robert Zeleznik, Andrew Bragdon, Ferdi Adeputra, and Hsu-Sheng Ko


Authors
The authors conducted this application research at Brown University as Ph. D. students, and are all still attending Brown University today.

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010.

Summary


The Hands-on Math research strove to combine free form pen and paper techniques with the power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS).  By combining muti-touch capabilities with a stylus pen, some core mathematics functionality was implemented to create a more flexible, powerful system without the pitfalls of simply "hitting the solve button" nor working out trivial math by hand (and consequent possible errors).

Hypothesis
Zeleznik sought to combine free form pen and paper techniques with the power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS).  The project was intended as a technique for students and mathematicians to be more readily equipped to "see" the problem without making small mistakes.

Methods
The Hands-on Math project used multi-touch capabilities combined with a stylus pen to achieve a variety of gestures on a Microsoft Surface.  The stylus could do basic things such as write expressions, while the hand was reserved for manipulation purposes such as factoring expressions and creating new work space.  A study using students from the Brown University had the users attempting to use the system.  The users' experiences with the system were split up by page interaction, mathematics, and gestures.

Results
The observations from the user studies revealed that some of the gestures were not natural, such as the different finger poses.  It was reported that users tried to adopt awkward arm positions and exaggerated finger positions to obtain functionality that was intended to be simple.  However, once these were demonstrated, better grace did ensue.

Discussion


At first, I believed this approach could reap some real benefits.  I still believe that it succeeded in combining the elementary portions of pen-and-paper and CAS, however I am less certain about the execution.  The paper does mention that the users were asked to ignore minor glitches because the implementation was not their main concern, but I am inclined to believe that the proper implementation will make all the difference in the final deliverable.  With some more studying, perhaps more testing (and the outside input incurred therein), I believe the team would have been more successful in their findings.  Awkward positions when trying to execute basic actions is a red flag for re-design attention in my mind.  I did really enjoy the non-dominant hand used as a menu bar where ever it was positioned on the screen, however I am very concerned about how maintainable such a position is during heavy use.  Nevertheless, in as far as basic mathematics are concerned, I think this would be an amazing device to be able to carry around (not that you could right now. I can wish, aye?) and whip out when that overzealous math-friend tries to best you in a contest of differentials.  Let the contests BEGIN!