TEACHING EXPERIENCE WITH A TOUCH-SCREEN DEVICE SMARTBOARD IMPLEMENTED WITH LOW COST DEVICES

The new generation consoles (PS3, Xbox360 and Wii) has also arrived to the Educational Centers. We want to emphasize at this point, the Nintendo Wii console, which has introduced a new way to play games with the Wiimote. This command incorporates various motion sensors, accelerometers and a camera and infrared light. The Wiimote will be one of the main elements of the touch screen used in the development of our classes. In front of this proposed system, we could get a commercial smartboard, but the cost of these smartboards are around 1200€, while the proposed system only costs 50€. Our experience is based in the software distributed by J.C. Lee (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/) and we have introduced little modifications to used in our theorical and practical lessons. The system is composed by a Wiimote, a bluetooth adapted, a computer with Windows XP, a video projector and a Whiteboard (a wall can also be used). All these components can be found in educational environments. We will only need one additional component that we will have to create. We will need a Infrared Light improved with a IR LED. If we could not find it, we would modify a LED lamp available in electronics shops, changing the White emisor LED with an infrared LED we will get a small and mobile pointer that can be used in a classroom. In the paper, we explain the process to install and configure it. At the University Miguel Hernández, some of the members who are presenting this work, teach about communication networks. Our teaching includes both classroom lectures on theory, practical classes in the laboratory of computer science. Finally, we expose how we have used this system in our practical classroom obtaining a good interaction with students without spending a big amount of money in more expensive systems like commercial smartboards.