Microsoft MultiPoint SDK

MultiPoint Developer Forums Live on MSDN!

2009-04-09T00:25:00Z

The new MultiPoint Developer Forums are now live on MSDN! These forums provide you an exciting opportunity to join a community of MultiPoint developers where you can share knowledge, get questions answered, and learn from others experienced with the MultiPoint SDK. The forums also allow you the chance report possible SDK issues, as well as provide the MultiPoint product team with feature suggestions for upcoming MultiPoint SDK releases.

Begin your participation in the forums today by posting your MultiPoint related questions in the forum corresponding to your topic of interest. Looking forward to seeing you there!

MultiPoint Education Award – Mentor a Team Today!

2009-03-31T02:50:00Z

Many of you who follow the MultiPoint blog are aware that this year the MultiPoint team is sponsoring the MultiPoint Education Award at Imagine Cup 2009 – the world’s premier student technology competition.

As captain of this year's Award, I invite those of you who have experience developing with the MultiPoint SDK to become an Imagine Cup Mentor – volunteering your expertise to help coach student teams and answer their technical questions as they create their MultiPoint applications.

Becoming a mentor is simple! Just register on the Imagine Cup website as a Mentor and make a post to the MultiPoint Education Award forum including a short description of your professional/academic background, and experience developing with the SDK. From the forum you can connect with student teams looking for mentors, and provide them with valuable guidance to help make their projects a success.

If you are someone who shares our passion for MultiPoint and believes in the creativity of student developers, I highly encourage you to consider this opportunity. Thank you.

MultiPoint SDK version 1.1 release!

2009-03-23T19:58:00Z

We just released the MultiPoint SDK version 1.1 which includes APIs, code samples, tools, and documentation on MS download. Click here for the download.

This version of the MultiPoint SDK includes many new features and enhancements, including:

· Resolution of major functionality issues leading to a more reliable and stable code base with additional debugging capabilities.

· Support of Visual Basic based project templates.

· Compatibility with Visual 2008 through project templates.

· Support for extending existing Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation controls to support multiple mouse cursors.

· Improved Plug n Play Support for input devices.

· Integration with Flash based object model resulting in easier development of Flash applications based on the SDK.

· Developer ready white papers and video tutorials.

· Better sample applications along with the sample code.

Releasing this improved version of the MultiPoint SDK is a part of our mission to provide relevant, affordable solutions that extend access and enhance educational experiences in the classroom. Over the next few months, we will be working with education content developers in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, China, Russia and Romania to build and distribute robust and rich learning applications on the MultiPoint SDK version 1.1.

We also look forward to a wave of creativity through the Imagine Cup MultiPoint Award category and other worldwide developer contests.

We would love to get your thoughts and comments on this new version!

MultiPoint SDK Update

2009-02-10T21:36:00Z

I'm sorry for the delayed update. I know many of you have been waiting for the next release of the SDK, which we hoped would come out in December. We decided to make a few more improvements and expect Version 1.1 to be released in early March. We're on track for this. Apologies for the delay but we hope you will all be happy with the enhancements in the new version. Additionally, I wanted to let everyone know that MultiPoint is a part of Imagine Cup this year. Right now the MultiPoint award has the second highest number of entries! If any of you are student developers, you should definitely consider entering - http://www.imaginecup.com/up.

MultiPoint Update

2008-11-11T04:05:00Z

As Kentaro mentioned in the last blog post, I've been lucky to join the MultiPoint family and look forward to the innovation that this SDK will drive within the developer community. Kentaro's research and early trials shows that this technology can create considerable educational value if the right applications are built.

Check out the new website for MultiPoint which has some useful white-papers and videos – www.microsoft.com/multipoint. And stay tuned for the next version of the MultiPoint SDK coming out in December. If you've created an exciting application and want to share it with schools around the world, send an email to multipt@microsoft.com.

The Birth of MultiPoint

2008-11-07T04:50:00Z

It’s incredibly exciting for me to see the creation of this blog and what it represents – increased momentum behind MultiPoint for PCs in schools!

MultiPoint was conceived during the summer of 2005. That summer, a then-PhD-student from UC Berkeley, Joyojeet Pal, did a research internship with us at Microsoft Research India (MSR India) to investigate how computers were being used in 30 rural primary schools across India, most of which were sponsored to some degree by the Azim Premji Foundation. In his final presentation, he showed pictures of PC after PC in schools... and what was interesting was that, unlike in wealthy schools in developed countries, they were each surrounded by several kids. In some cases, two or three students sat at one PC, in others, as many as ten. In most of these cases, a dominant bully hogged the mouse and keyboard. Joyojeet, moved by the injustice of these arrangements, recommended that teachers move students around periodically, so that different children would have a chance to interact with the PC.

When I saw the photographs, however, my first reaction was to fix the problem with technology (technological fixes, I’ve since discovered, are not always a good idea, but it happened to work in this instance!): If you have five children at a PC, why not provide five mice? Unfortunately, at the time, I was too busy with other work to follow up.

That August, we were fortunate to be joined by Udai Singh Pawar, a fresh graduate of IIT Kanpur. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are renowned worldwide for their science and engineering graduates. When Udai came on board, I gave him time to think about what he might want to work on, and suggested a few possible research topics including "multi-mouse." Udai was a physics major and had worked with novel keyboards and robotics-for-children as an undergrad. Building things and working in education were in his blood. And, after a couple of weeks, he told me, "I’d like to see what we can do with multiple mice."

Udai worked fast. Within a couple of weeks he had a demo of several cursors dancing on the screen, each controlled by a mouse. There were glitches in the early prototypes – the cursors blinked in and out or they adopted non-cursor shapes – but I was nevertheless amazed and delighted. He then started planning a series of studies that would allow us to observe how real students would respond to multi-mouse, and also wrote a couple of simple educational applications he could use to test. 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, just to get a sense for whether the concept would work. Would kids get it? Could they distinguish their cursors from others? Would they like it? We tried various groups of children first interacting with the game with one mouse for a while; then, after 10-20 minutes, we’d add mice to match every child. 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 decided to test something that had some basic educational value in India and was also easy to measure: English-language vocabulary. We set up a game where the goal was to match pictures of animals with their English names – e.g., cow, elephant, snake, ferret. There were two versions of the game – competitive and collaborative – with both versions “collapsing” to the same one-mouse version of the game with there was only one mouse. We put students in groups of five, with various ratios of boys and girls. 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, which many schools cannot afford. In addition, there were gender effects that researchers of technology and education have long known about. Boys always want to compete, and will compete blindly without learning much, unless the game forces collaboration. Girls always seemed to help each other regardless of the set up. So, a collaborative game is preferred to tilt the odds in favor of real learning for everyone. You can read more about this and the initial research for MultiPoint at http://research.microsoft.com/users/udaip/multipoint.htm.

The rest is history… When we showed these results to Sherri Bealkowski, then a general manager in Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (UPG), she immediately saw the value for schools, and worked with Jed Rose and Microsoft’s Education Product Group to develop a free MultiPoint software development kit (SDK). Meanwhile, Neema Moraveji from MSR Asia heard about MultiPoint and proposed to apply multiple mice to a whole-classroom situation, which he did with much success in China (he's now a PhD student at Stanford). 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. And, most recently, Nasha Fitter joined UPG as a senior product manager to spread MultiPoint wherever it might be useful. This blog was her idea, and I couldn’t be happier that she’s joined the MultiPoint virtual family. Maybe you will, too!

Welcome to the MultiPoint Blog!

2007-05-23T10:03:00Z

The Windows MultiPoint SDK is a project that started out in Microsoft Research India and has been transferred to the Microsoft Education Products Group in the India Development Center (IDC) late last year.

Today we are proud to announce our second Community Technology Preview (CTP). You can download the Microsoft Windows MultiPoint SDK CTP 2 release from the Microsoft Download Center. This release includes lots of new features including a new sample application (multiplayer Tic-Tac-Toe), updated control samples, better Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) integration and numerous other updates that allow you to create even better MultiPoint-enabled applications.

Let us know what you think about this latest release in the comments. Also let us know if you run into trouble or have questions. While we won’t be able to answer every question individually, we’ll do our best to respond to comments and answer the most popular questions in future postings.

The MultiPoint Team.