A Mischief of Mice: Examining Children's Performance in Single Display Groupware Systems With 1 to 32 Mice

Researchers have explored the application of single-display groupware systems to support small group educational activities. Recently, these systems have been extended to support entire classrooms of students using a single large display simultaneously. There are several advantages to this shared-display design over a more conventional one. Costs are typically lower than supplying each student with an individual computer and new cooperative and competitive tasks can be performed on a shared screen in ways that might better engage the students. This paper describes a study which evaluates children's performance in target acquisition tasks on a single shared large display in group sizes of 1, 4, 8, 16 and 32.