Classroom 2000: An experiment with the instrumentation of a living educational environment

One potentially useful feature of future computing environments will be the ability to capture the live experiences of the occupants and to provide that record to users for later access and review. Over the last three years, a group at the Georgia Institute of Technology has designed and extensively used a particular instrumented environment: a classroom that captures the traditional lecture experience. This paper describes the history of the Classroom 2000 project and provides results of extended evaluations of the effect of automated capture on the teaching and learning experience. There are many important lessons to take away from this long-term, large-scale experiment with a living, ubiquitous computing environment. The environment should address issues of scale and extensibility, it should continuously be evaluated for effectiveness, and the ways in which the environment both improves and hinders the activity that it aims to support—in our case, education—need to be understood and acted upon. In d escribing our experiences and lessons learned, we hope to motivate other researchers to take more seriously the challenge of ubiquitous computing—the creation and exploration of the everyday use of computationally rich environments.