Collaborative concept mapping at the tabletop

Abstract

Concept mapping is a technique where users externalise their conceptual and propositional knowledge of a domain in a way that can be readily understood by others. It is widely used in education, so that a learner's understanding is made available to their peers and to teachers. There is considerable potential educational benefit in collaborative concept mapping, and the tabletop is an ideal tool for this. This paper describes Cmate, a tabletop collaborative concept mapping system. We describe its design process and how this draws upon both the principles of concept mapping and on those for creating educational applications on tabletops. © 2010 ACM.