Introduction

In the past few years, various small computational toys have taken our children's relationship with computers to a new level. The emerging mobile interactive devices can enhance not only mobility and flexibility in learning, but also facilitate collaborative learning via the built‐in connectivity unities, like blue‐tooth and infra-red.

Collaborative Learning:
In collaborative learning, the aim is either to allow learners to combine their own expertise to achieve mutual goal or to allow the more expert learners teaching others. Collaborative learning increases learner's participations, achievements and gain appreciation for the diversity of viewpoints.

Why an Interactive device?
The growth of the Internet and related technologies is fueling enormous change across our entire society. These technologies have the potential to introduce new ways to encourage education, collaboration and community building introducing a new set of skills. We cannot abnegate children from coming technology. But, what we can do is to shape technology in such a way that it becomes a medium for creation and exploration towards inadvertent learning.

The studies conducted with kids and teachers showed that the group activities are preferred to individual ones. Kids are always enthusiastic to learn and explore more in groups. Also, the diversity in children's interests and expectations of their handheld computers is what has produced a growing market for a large number of specialized devices.

This project 'Handheld Interactive Device - For Collaborative Learning among Kids' is based on the concept of 'Collaborative learning' where a group of kids, sharing similar interests, collectively get involved in a collaborative creative activity and inadvertently learn each other's skills and knowledge through experimentation and sharing of ideas. Finally, different groups with different interests come together to share their creative products.

The idea of sharing and interaction between groups and the kind of competition' motivates them to work as team. This helps them come up with better results by sharing the best of their knowledge. Also, the stronger ones in a group help the weaker ones to perform well. The focus is on collaborative activities within a group which can induce 'Inter group' or 'Group to group' activities.

The final solution targets to provide children an environment with freedom to explore create and evaluate on their own unlike most of the collaborative learning tools today, which are more like computational creation kits.

Case Study Downloads:
• Handheld Interactive Device – For Collaborative Learning among Kids - Pdf