The effects of implementing the ‘FireFlies V2’ system in a secondary school classroom on teachers and students
Summary
In this research, a new classroom technology is presented. The design of this technology is based on earlier research about design for peripheral interaction and secondary school teachers’ routines. The purpose of designing technologies for peripheral interaction, is that they can be more fluently embedded into peoples’ routines, by requiring fewer mental resources than technologies that do not enable peripheral interaction. The designed system is called ‘FireFlies V2’ and its purpose is to give secondary school teachers awareness about their attention distribution. The effects of implementing the FireFlies V2 system in a secondary school classroom on teachers and students were studied. Ten secondary school teachers participated in this research, by using the system FireFlies V2 during two of their lessons. During another two lessons, the FireFlies were not implemented and the teacher was only being tracked. At the end of all of the lessons, both the teachers and the students filled out a questionnaire that was put together by the researchers and the teachers were interviewed. This paper discusses the quantitative results, which indicate that the sample of teachers was probably too small to find significant results: The FireFlies V2 system did not affect the teacher’s self-reports about awareness, satisfaction and mental effort. Also their division of presence over the front and back of the classroom was not influenced by the system. However, the testing of a new technology with experimental methods hasn’t been done before and further exploration and improvement in future research would be interesting.