Review by: Reichert, Raimond (2004-08-04)

This paper reports on a case study in designing and assessing a particular piece of handheld software for educational use in schools. As there is some debate on mobile learning in higher education but few concrete projects, this paper is reviewed here to illustrate the challenges of designing educational applications for mobile devices in contexts other than higher education.

The project developed a handheld concept mapping tool, Pocket PiCoMap, to support students during concept mapping activities. The paper outlines the design guidelines that were followed in designing the user interface of the tool. Particular emphasis is on a number of scaffolds. For example, the tool provides a link scaffold in which the direction of a relationship between two ideas is made explicit as a textual statement. The reason for this scaffold is the observation that students often have problems interpreting directed relationships.

Of particular interest here are the results of a 9-months classroom study in which the use of Pocket PiCoMap was compared with the use of a desktop PC-based concept mapping tool, PiViT. Regarding the overall comparison of the handheld tool vs. desktop-based tool, the authors were pleasantly surprised by their students’ success in creating concept maps on their handhelds. For example, the study showed that the link scaffold was very effective in assisting students in drawing correct relationships.

However, there were several areas where the small form of the mobile devices made them more difficult to use. For example, the evaluation of the concept maps showed that 50% of the Pocket PiCoMap concept maps were scored unreadable. That is, less than half of the map elements (concepts, relationships) were visible. In contrast, none of the PiViT maps were considered unreadable. 30% percept of PiCoMap maps had orphan nodes (concept nodes that were unconnected to the rest of the concept map), whereas only 1 out of 16 PiViT maps contained orphan nodes.

The results of this case study concern usability issues of handheld applications due to space restrictions. These issues are most probably independent of the age of the users and should therefore be of interest to designers of any mobile educational application. Design guidelines such as those outlined in this paper are needed which take the devices’ restrictions into account.