Classroom Dandelions: Visualising Participant Position, Trajectory and Body Orientation Augments Teachers' Sensemaking

Despite the digital revolution, physical space remains the site for teaching and learning embodied knowledge and skills. Both teachers and students must develop spatial competencies to effectively use classroom spaces, enabling fluid verbal and non-verbal interaction. While video permits rich activity capture, it provides no support for quickly seeing activity patterns that can assist learning. In contrast, position tracking systems permit the automated modelling of spatial behaviour, opening new possibilities for feedback. This paper introduces the design rationale for "Dandelion Diagrams" that integrate participant location, trajectory and body orientation over a variable period. Applied in two authentic teaching contexts (a science laboratory, and a nursing simulation) we show how heatmaps showing only teacher/student location led to misinterpretations that were resolved by overlaying Dandelion Diagrams. Teachers Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI ’22, April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9157-3/22/04. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517736 also identified a variety of ways they could aid professional development. We conclude Dandelion Diagrams assisted sensemaking, but discuss the ethical risks of over-interpretation.