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pilot projects have often not yet been published or
are sometimes not even scientifically evaluated. One
of the first published results by Isabwe et al. (Is-
abwe et al., 2012b; Isabwe et al., 2012a) concentrates
on math teaching and peer assessment techniques.
Still unpublished efforts include an initiative for K12
math by Shocken et al. (Schocken, 2012) (creator of
Nand2Tetris (Schocken et al., 2009)). A more com-
prehensive discussion on the use of tablets in differ-
ent subjects is, to our knowledge, still missing. The
research community is certainly trying to close this
gap, but we are only starting to catch up.
2.1 Tablet Deployments
Tablet devices have already been widely deployed at
many schools in the US and Western Europe. Often,
these deployments result from the initiative of local
teachers and parents. Larger deployments initiated by
government organizations are much less frequent.
In the following we would like to briefly mention
two examples of those deployments in Italy and Ger-
many.
One of the larger deployments is a project in sour-
thern Tyrol, Italy (Farias, 2011). Several hundreds of
students participate in a pilot project on tablet-based
teaching. The project uses Android tablets and all
school books are provided in electronic form by the
respective publishers.
The first goal of the project to replace conven-
tional textbooks has already been accomplished and
both students and teachers are very satisfied with the
solution. The crucial point of adapting the text book’s
content to tablet based teaching has not yet been tack-
led by the publishers so far. In most cases they just
provide a PDF file of their traditional paper-based text
book.
Another deployment is organized by the city of
Mannheim, Germany (Klinga, 2011). This deploy-
ment of some hundred tablets is based on the popular
Apple iPad. The iPads are not supposed to replace
conventional text books, but e.g. to create multime-
dia presentations or documentations. The exact use
of the tablets in the curriculum, however, depends on
the individual teachers (Klinga, 2011).
Since publishers are not involved in the project, it
is often not obvious for teachers to find appropriate
content. While there is a certain amount of material
available in English (e.g. in the iBook Store), content
in other languages e.g. German is mostly missing.
Many critics therefore even believe that tablet-based
teaching is a temporary, short-term fashion, which
will eventually fade. This again stresses the urgent
need for optimized, interactive content.
2.2 Learning Content
Because of the lack of scientific and practical experi-
ence, publishers and teachers seem to be unsure how
to create content for the new devices. There is no
widely accepted learning concept or content available
for tablet devices.
Apple has proposed a proprietary standard namely
iBooks to create such content and wants to provide the
technical platform. Relying on this iBook standard,
however, gives Apple full control over the distribu-
tion. More over, publishers are restricted to features
provided by the iBooks software. These are two of
several reasons why many publishers have so far been
skeptical about this platform.
Some publishers prefer the competing Android
platform developed by Google. At this moment, there
is, however, no established standard and little content
beyond traditional books (provided as E-Book).
3 COMPUTER USAGE
Historically there have been many debates on whether
to use computing devices for teaching. The more im-
portant question, however, is when and how to use
those devices. Here the new form factors of comput-
ing: laptops and tablets have paved the way to a more
ubiquitous use of computers in schools.
All of these form factors have certain strengths
and weaknesses as far as effective learning is con-
cerned. We will discuss these in the following two
subsections. In particular, we would like to point out
the reasons, why tablet devices have become so pop-
ular in such a short time.
3.1 Laptops
Even though there have been many ambitious
projects, e.g. the One-Laptop-Per-Child project by
Nicholas Negroponte (Negroponte, 2006), laptops
have not revolutionized our way of teaching. While
they are very capable devices, in fact, they are much
more capable than today’s tablet devices, teachers are
still hesitant in the adoption.
One issue has certainly been the relatively high
price for schools and students. However, the more
important issues seem to be that laptops are compli-
cated. Schools need trained system administrators to
setup and maintain the devices. And also students,
particularly younger students, need training to get ac-
customed to keyboard, mouse and a complex operat-
ing system.
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