Calligraphic Drawing for Collaborative Virtual Whiteboard Systems

Interactive whiteboards have become more popular and also essential tools for teaching and learning, especially in basic education classrooms. Studies have been reported on high levels of student motivation, teacher enthusiasm and whole-school support associated with these technological tools. Many researches have reported about the potential of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) to improve the quality of teaching and learning processes by enhancing levels of interaction, communication and collaboration. However, even nowadays, these IBWs suffer some difficulties at drawing time, in other words, are not suitable for freehand drawing, since they require more precision than the traditional input devices like mouse. Meanwhile, it is the preferable form and direct style to use at the teaching or explaining time. These difficulties are inherent to the input device, since the mouse still is the most used and the vast majority of people have no possibilities to get more expensive devices with support to stylus pen. Thus, considering that the mouse is the input device to draw, to do a freehand draw in any popular software is very tedious and frustrating experience. In this research work, we present the incorporation of the old well know DynaDraw drawing technique, into a online collaborative drawing application, which is able to produce drawings in a similar way to do with a pen, using the mouse. The results, on freehand style drawing, compared to other current software, are very satisfactory considering nor special software neither additional hardware are needed. For the implementation, traditional coding frameworks like node.js, express.js, io.js and MongoDB were used, since the main goal is share a drawing work collaboratively. Finally, our implementation is easy to install in other popular teaching and learning platforms like Moodle.