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Multi-touch, Gesture Control, Teaching Station, Natural User Interface, Effective Teaching

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a cost effective multi-touch teaching station that support existing educational applications and the custom-made Multi-touch Teaching Module that are being used by instructor to teach undergraduate engineering laboratory class in Multimedia University. The technology-enhanced teaching station was developed based on optical tracking technique known as Frustrated Total Internal Refraction (FTIR) to achieve multi-touch capabilities on the table surface. The Adobe Flash-based Multi-touch Teaching Module supports popular multi-touch gestures including panning, rotating, zooming in and out on multimedia educational content such as streaming video lecture, animation and schematic diagram. The Multi-touch Teaching Module enhances the way lecturers manipulate teaching material such as enlarging a complex electronic circuitry with just fingers\' gesture when operating with the teaching station. When operating the multi-touch teaching station with existing educational applications, lecturers can use it as a normal touch screen to directly interact with the application instead of using a mouse or keyboard, making the interface more intuitive. Some lecturers have evaluated the teaching station and provided positive feedback over standard computer because it is much easier to operate. In short, the paper summarizes the experience in developing a universal multi-touch teaching station and Multi-touch Teaching Module as well as the system evaluation by instructors in an undergraduate engineering laboratory class, which is valuable for those who intend to enhance teaching platform with technology in a university.