The educational concepts behind Digital Mysteries have been developed through years of research on technology enhanced collaborative learning.

The main ideas of how to best encourage effective collaboration and higher level thinking evolved through a number of design cycles with trials conducted in classrooms with school children. The main publications that explain some of the educational concepts behind the design are:

TLin, M; Preston, A; Kharrufa, A; Kong, Z. (2014) Collaborative enquiry through the tabletop for second/foreign language learners

In "CALL Design: Principles and Practice - Proceedings of the 2014 EUROCALL Conference, Groningen, The Netherlands". Pages: 202-208. PDF here.

Leat, D., and Nichols, A. (2000) Brains on the Table

Diagnostic and formative assessment through observation. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice. Vol. 7, Iss. 1. (Publisher's website)

Heslop, P., Kharrufa, A., Balaam, M., Leat, D., Dolan, P., Olivier, P. (2013) Learning extended writing: designing for children\'s collaboration

In IDC '13 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (New York, USA, June 24-27, 2013) 36-45. (Click here to view)

Kharrufa, A.S., Olivier, P., Leat, D (2010)

Learning Through Reflection at the Tabletop: A Case Study with Digital Mysteries

In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (Toronto, Canada June 28-July 2, 2010) 65-674. (You can download the paper from EdITlib Digital Library)

Kharrufa, A., Martinez-Maldonado., R; Kay, J., Olivier, P (2013) Extending tabletop application design to the classroom

In ITS 2013 Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces. Pages 115-124. PDF here

Kharrufa, A.S., Leat, D., Olivier, P. (2010)

Digital Mysteries: Designing for Learning at the Tabletop

The Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010. (Saarbrücken, Germany, November 7-10, 2010). ITS'10. (The paper and an accompanying video can be downloaded from the conference website).

Kharrufa, A., Balaam, M., Heslop, P., Leat, D., Dolan, P., Olivier, P. (2013).

Tables in the Wild: Lessons Learned from a Large-Scale Multi-Tabletop Deployment.

The Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2013. (Paris, France, 27 April-2 May). CHI'13 PDF here