Eberly Center

What’s an instrumented classroom and how can it inform your teaching?

Gerritsen, D. and Lovett, M.

Have you ever wondered how long you pause after asking a question in class or whether your students are engaging in productive collaboration during small-group work? How could you improve the learning experience if you had more information about what happens during class? An instrumented classroom can help address these (and other) questions by collecting data via microphones, cameras, and other sensors while class is in session. Computers can process low-level visual and auditory data streams to produce more meaningful information about teaching and learning. For example, an analysis of class audio can produce the patterns of teacher’s speech by identifying the number, duration, and length of each utterance. Participants will have the opportunity to experience interactive, dynamic technology that transforms video and audio streams of real classrooms into quantifiable geometric body “poses” and waveform data.

David Gerritsen, Eberly Center
Marsha Lovett, Eberly Center