Newton's Pen

Abstract

We present Newton's Pen, a statics tutor implemented on a computer, a writing instrument with an integrated digitizer and embedded processor. The tutor, intended for undergraduate education, scaffolds students in the construction of free body diagrams and equilibrium equations. This project entailed the development of sketch understanding techniques and user interface principles for creating pedagogically-sound instructional tools for pentop computers. Development on the pentop platform presented novel challenges because of limited computational resources and a visually static, ink-on-paper display (the only dynamic output device is an audio speaker). We show that a system architecture based on a finite state machine reduces the computational complexity, and serves as a convenient means for providing context-sensitive tutorial help. Our pilot study suggests that Newton's Pen has potential as an effective teaching tool.