Paper Reading #2- Hands-on math: a page-based multi-touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving

Title: Hands-on math: a page-based multi-touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving
Reference Information:
Ferdi Adeputra, Andrew Bragdon, Hsu-Sheng Ko, and Robert Zeleznik. "Hands-on math: a page-based multi-touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving". UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0271-5.
Author Bios:
Ferdi Adeputra currently is employed by Brown University within the Computer Science department. He is a teaching assistant for Professor John Hughes in a course entitled "Interactive Graphics".
Andrew Bragdon is currently a second-year Ph.D student in Computer Science at Brown University. Andrew has worked at Microsoft, traveled around giving special lectures, and published multiple works in the field of Human-Computer Interactions within Computer Science.
Hsu-Sheng Ko is also currently employed by Brown University within the Computer Science department as a teaching assistant.
Robert Zeleznik received his Master's Degree in Computer Science from Brown University. He is currently a Director for research in the computer graphics group over at Brown University. Robert has done a number of significant things in his past, including becoming a co-founder of CTO as a software architect.
Summary:

• Hypothesis: "...if CAS tools were driven by a direct, multi-touch manipulation and digital ink within a free-form note-taking environment, students and even scientists and engineers might learn and work more effectively."
• Methods: The authors tested different techniques on their product to see which excelled and which did not. They selected 9 udergraduate students from Brown University to test their product within a a laboratory environment, asking the volunteers to perform a series of actions with the "Hands-On" device and to rate the product at the conclusion of the experiment. These actions included creating and manipulating pages, performing calculations, solving complex math equations using multi-step derivations, graphing, using the software modules to change "modes" (say from ink to selection), web clipping, and manipulating contents of a page with the implemented gestures.
• Results: Without even being told to, the volunteers began writing and manipulating pages. It was often noted that the volunteers "played" with the device and its features for longer than necessary to perform individual tasks. Not to the authors' surprise, none of the volunteers discovered all of the capabilities (such as page creation or deletion) without instruction. A lot of the features (for example, page clipping) were sought of as unnatural and unnecessary by the volunteers. Users really enjoyed having the "step-by-step" process for math-related work rather than just inputting a question and getting an answer spit out at them. This way, the users can see the steps taken to achieve an answer.
• Contents: In this paper, four men (the authors) sought to show off their created work which they called "Hands-OnMath". They tested it out in practical situations with typical users other than themselves by recruiting random volunteers from the university to come in and be a part of their experiement to measure the success of their creation. After each experiment was conducted, results were gathered. The whole point of this was to see whether the technologies of a pen and paper and of a CAS (computer algebra system) could be merged and implemented as one (since each technology has its own advantages and disadvantages).

Discussion:
I believe that this creation definitely has a future and that this paper was somewhat interesting. I would tend to agree with a lot of the volunteers in that some gestures (such as manipulating data on a page) do not need a bi-manual action. The implementation of this device could use some work, in my opinion, but the device itself is a great proponent to mathematics and to the efficiency of working problems out. These guys seemed to have thought of a smart and simple way to change from a "stylus" to a "selector" per say, and to also incorporate error compensation into the way they implemented this system. One example of this is the page deletion technique that they implemented. I love how (to delete a page) you must drag the page off the screen, and then back on into the trash can rather than just off the screen. After all, you might just want the page out of the way instead of deleted. I also like the palm rejection technique. Because for people like me, I like to rest my hand on the page that I'm working on so I don't want the program to think I'm trying to do something that I'm not all of the time.