New Perspectives in Science Education

Workshops, a form of group learning activity aimed at encouraging idea creation, require reflection to ensure meaningful outcomes. This paper proposes a method to support reflection for workshops aimed at proposing policies to solve social issues [1]. The proposed method enables policy makers who did not participate in the workshop to reflect on its outcomes and use them as evidence for decision-making. To achieve this, we developed a system that allows anyone to reflect on and analyze workshop activities. In these workshops, participants often write ideas on sticky notes, which are placed onto a single large sheet of paper. The sticky notes are then organized on the paper using the affinity diagram method [2], which involves grouping related ideas together, to enable participants to structure their ideas visually. The resulting organized outputs represent the workshop's primary outcomes. However, reflecting on the activities solely based on these final outputs is difficult, especially for individuals who did not participate in the workshop. Therefore, this study focuses on the content of the sticky notes and the changes in their placement over time. We recorded the workshop process by capturing overhead video to record how sticky notes were placed and moved on the paper. We implemented a system to recognize the sticky notes and track their movements to analyze the activity dynamics, such as how sticky notes were moved and grouped over time. Furthermore, we examined the grouping methods used during the idea organization phase. We enhanced the system that allows users to interactively organize sticky notes into customizable categories. While the conventional affinity diagram method was still evaluated as being more conducive to providing an overarching view of the ideas, the proposed system was shown to effectively create overlapping groupings and efficiently classify content, demonstrating its practical advantages.