Abstract—Quality primary education is a key focus in development. Educational software has the potential to help teachers provide good education. Due to limited computer resources in low-income schools, there has been substantial ICTD interest on multiple-user educational tools. Building on the foundation of research that addressed the technical problems and the humancomputer-interface (HCI) concerns of multiple-input interfaces, our work on the educational game MultiLearn+ focuses on the potential educational benefits of multi-user systems. In contrast to prior ICTD multi-input educational designs, MultiLearn+ adapts the educational experience for each student within the group setting. This personalization may better meet individual students ’ needs. Our experimental results show that the adaptive capabilities of MultiLearn+ help even the competition between differingstudentbackgroundsandabilitiesinacompetitivegame, increasing the probability that students will remain engaged and challenged. I.

Abstract-Many children, especially in the developing world, must share a computer at school. Often, more advanced or aggressive students dominate, leaving others frustrated and disengaged. One promising approach is to provide each student with their own input device, usually a mouse, while sharing a common computer and display. Previous multiple mouse sharing efforts for education have relied on developing custom applications that encourage collaboration -for example, by requiring that all users click on an icon or option to proceed. Implementing this requires access to application source code, which is unlikely to be available, and would require significant engineering effort to adapt even if it was. To address these limitations, we developed Metamouse. Metamouse only conveys clicks to the application when users have already agreed on a screen location, within a pre-defined tolerance (a novel sharing technique that we call "location-voting") and requires no access to the application source code. We have implemented two versions of locationvoting -one that requires all users to agree ("Consensus"), and another where only a majority is required ("Majority"). To evaluate Metamouse, we conducted a user study with 24 fifthgrade students in a low-income school in Bangalore, India. Our results demonstrate that Metamouse is intuitive, usable and has the potential to outperform other sharing strategies in terms of user engagement, generating discussion, and overall satisfaction. We also show that the Majority approach provides all of these benefits as effectively as Consensus with less frustration for faster users and less embarrassment for slower ones.

Computer assisted learning (or E-learning) is used broadly in the developed world. However, comparable technologies are only recently beginning to be used in rural and developing regions. In these environments, obstacles to the successful deployment of educational software include a lack of basic infrastructure, low student attendance, necessary sharing of resources, and the participants’— both teachers and students—unfamiliarity with communications technology. To illustrate these issues in detail, we present a design study for Metamouse, a system for sharing single user software on a single computer with multiple mice. We designed Metamouse during a one and a half month long study in low-income primary schools in Bangalore, India. We iterated through two primary usage paradigms, competitive and collaborative, working with grade four and five students. In these populations, we found that students had widely varying mouse skills, and that even amongst competent users, interface confusion presented significant barriers. Given this, interface tasks that are known to have a cost in usability, such as mode switching or complicated interaction models, had a severe impact on students’ ability to use the technology. We discuss interface issues that result from sharing practices that are the norm in these regions. We also discuss issues that generalize across educational application design in the developing world. 1.