ThinkActive 2017

software, openlab

ThinkActive uses inexpensive activity trackers combined with a classroom situated base station and pseudonymous avatars to engage primary school children in understanding their personal informatics data. Designed in collaboration with Newcastle United Foundation and their MatchFit schools programme.

The base station is an always-on display that acts as a public focal point in the classroom, presenting a daily or weekly class challenge and the progress made. Pupils contribute their steps for the challenge through the simple interaction of scanning a QR code in their workbook, while wearing their activity tracker in proximity to the base station. This creates a BLE connection to their device that uploads their data and allows them to explore their individual activity patterns.

An Open Lab project with Andy Garbett. ThinkActive was deployed in two schools and won second place for Tech Innovation for the Future in the T3.com awards in 2018.

ThinkActive: Designing for Pseudonymous Activity Tracking in the Classroom (2018). Andrew Garbett, David Chatting, Gerard Wilkinson, Clement Lee and Ahmed Kharrufa. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173581