Designing OLMs for Reflection about Group Brainstorming at Interactive Tabletops

Brainstorming is a valuable and widely-used group technique to enhance creativity. Interactive tabletops have the potential to support brainstorming and, by exploiting learners’ trace data, they can provide Open Learner Models (OLMs) to support reflection on a brainstorming session. We describe our design of such OLMs to enable an individual to answer core questions: C1) how much did I contribute? C2) at what times was the group or an individual stuck? and C3) where did group members seem to ‘spark’ off each other? We conducted 24 brainstorming sessions and analysed them to create core brainstorming models underlying the OLMs. We evaluated the OLMs in a think-aloud study designed to see whether learners could interpret the OLMs to answer the core questions. Results indicate the OLMs were effective and that it is valuable, that learners benefit from guidance in their reflection and from drawing on an example of an excellent group’s OLM. Our contributions are: i) the first OLMs supporting reflection on brainstorming; ii) models of brainstorming that underlie the OLMs; and iii) a user study demonstrating that learners can use the OLMs to answer the core reflection questions.