Flipping the Flipped Classroom: A Study of the Effectiveness of Video Lectures Versus Constructivist Exploration Using Tangible User Interfaces

In this study, we show results that suggest tangible user interfaces (TUIs) may be used to prepare students for future learning. In a previous study, we found that students who used interactive tabletops before studying a text significantly outperformed participants who read a text first and used tabletops subsequently. These findings demonstrate that discovery-learning approaches are better suited to TUIs than traditional “tell-and-practice” approaches. In our current effort, we generalize our findings to a different population, a different learning material, and a different topic. In this study, we employ the tangible interface, Combinatorix (Fig. 1), which enables small groups of students to work collaboratively and discover concepts in probability. Our system supports students' explorations of principles in combinatorics (i.e., permutations and combinations) that serve as foundations for learning about probability. We describe the design of Combinatorix, as well as an experiment that examined the interaction between focused lectures and free exploration. We found that students who first explored the topic on a tangible interface and then watched a video lecture significantly outperformed students who watched a lecture first and then completed a hands-on activity. We discuss how the “functional fixedness” induced by the video lecture limited the students' learning of probability, and conclude with guidelines for implementing interactive tabletops in classrooms.