Can You Ink While You Blink? Assessing Mental Effort in a Sensor-Based Calligraphy Trainer.

Bibeg Hang Limbu,Marcus Specht,Halszka Jarodzka,Roland Klemke

doi:10.3390/s19143244

Abstract

Sensors can monitor physical attributes and record multimodal data in order to provide feedback. The application calligraphy trainer, exploits these affordances in the context of handwriting learning. It records the expert’s handwriting performance to compute an expert model. The application then uses the expert model to provide guidance and feedback to the learners. However, new learners can be overwhelmed by the feedback as handwriting learning is a tedious task. This paper presents the pilot study done with the calligraphy trainer to evaluate the mental effort induced by various types of feedback provided by the application. Ten participants, five in the control group and five in the treatment group, who were Ph.D. students in the technology-enhanced learning domain, took part in the study. The participants used the application to learn three characters from the Devanagari script. The results show higher mental effort in the treatment group when all types of feedback are provided simultaneously. The mental efforts for individual feedback were similar to the control group. In conclusion, the feedback provided by the calligraphy trainer does not impose high mental effort and, therefore, the design considerations of the calligraphy trainer can be insightful for multimodal feedback designers.

Highlights

Several authors, including Di Mitriv et al [1] and Specht et al [2] have elaborated on the reasons why sensors and multi-modality in learning are drawing so much attention
This paper presents the pilot study done with the calligraphy trainer to evaluate the mental effort induced by various types of feedback provided by the application
This study aims to evaluate the mental effort imposed by the calligraphy trainer and the types of feedback provided by the application

Summary

Introduction

Several authors, including Di Mitriv et al [1] and Specht et al [2] have elaborated on the reasons why sensors and multi-modality in learning are drawing so much attention. Sensors can monitor learner behavior to provide feedback for effective learning using the captured expert performance and are capable of supporting deliberate practice. Practicing deliberately requires additional mental effort because the learner needs to be conscious of his/her performance [5]. Common mistakes found in beginners include quickly forgetting to remind themselves to maintain the basic factors such as grip force, posture, and angle of the pen [18]. They quickly lose patience, which leads to quickly drawn strokes rather than slow, steady ones.

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