Notebooks in Education

About the Project

In this project, we have investigated how notebooks and wireless LAN can be used to provide a better learning environment. This approach was part of the national BMBF (Federal Ministery for Education and Research) project "Notebook Universities" and its local realisation "NUSS" (Notebook Universität Stuttgart).

In this project, we supported the course "Modeling and Control of Biological Systems", which gives an introduction to System Biology, an interdisciplinary research area combining the fields of (cell) biology and systems theory. Each topic of the course is practiced in computer exercises.
In order to allow the students to play a more aktiv role during the lecture, a shared whiteboard was used. This enabled the participants to make public and private anotations directly on the distributed course material on their laptops.
The second important goal was to break the separation between theoretical course and practical computer exercise. To do this, the course was no longer separated in these two parts, normally taking place at different times and places (lecture room/computer lab). Instead the tutor was free to do a computer exercise whenever a subject was discussed theoretically and needed to be illustrated in an exercise. To guarantee a smooth transition between course and exercise the tutor used an application, with which he could monitor the activities on the notebooks of the students. If needed, he could claim the control of a specific laptop and give advices. The same software was used to present exemplary results of the course participants. We also worked with a special chat tool which allowed to give specific feedback signals, like "I have a question", "I am ready with the exercise" or "The result is 42". Based on this feedback, the tutor was able dicide which further steps he wanted to perform.

Course

Thesis Projects

Links

• Notebook Universität Stuttgart
• BMBF-Portal "Notebook Universities"
• Systems Biology Homepage