The story behind MultiPoint
It’s incredibly exciting for us to see increased momentum with MultiPoint in schools!
MultiPoint was conceived during the summer of 2005 at Microsoft Research India, when we visited rural schools in India to understand how they use PCs. We discovered that unlike in wealthy schools where PC classrooms typically have a PC per student, developing-country schools can only afford a few PCs, even for a class of 40 children; every PC is surrounded by several kids – anywhere from 2 to 10, but never just one. In most cases, a dominant bully hogs the mouse and keyboard. When we saw this, we wondered, if you have five children at a PC, why not provide five mice? A couple of weeks later, we had a demo of several cursors dancing on the screen, each controlled by a mouse.
We started by writing a couple of simple educational applications to test the idea. One of the applications was a quiz game in which players hear a letter of the Kannada alphabet (local language in Bangalore, where our lab is based), and then must click on the correct letter among several. We started with an initial set of informal studies, and it didn’t take us long to discover that the children loved it! In fact, a few told us they didn’t understand why all PCs didn’t come with lots of mice. We tried this with several groups of children, and when we were convinced that this was worth testing further, we tried a more rigorous evaluation.
We wanted to show that MultiPoint could be as effective as a single-PC-per-person configuration for at least some learning tasks. We tested an application that taught English-language vocabulary, where students were put in groups of five. They were then administered a pre-test which tested what words they already knew, allowed to play the game for 15 minutes, and then given a post test. All together, 238 students participated in the evaluation. The results showed that on the whole, students could learn as much with MultiPoint as with a single PC to themselves. This was great news, because it meant that at a fraction of a cost of a single PC, students could learn as much in certain types of educational activities: With five students at one PC, the per-student cost of computing is approximately 1/5 that of a one-PC-per-child configuration. I invite you to read more about this initial research.
Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (UPG), immediately saw the value of MultiPoint for schools, and they built the first MultiPoint software development kit (SDK), which was recently updated. Bill Gates now speaks about MultiPoint as a kind of “creative capitalism,” where corporations spend a portion of their resources to design products and businesses for developing markets.
- Kentaro Toyama, Assistant Managing Director, Microsoft Research India
