The lack of interactivity in the classroom has been identified as an important
barrier to make the learning processes more effective. Although several
instructional strategies and dynamics have been proposed, including the use of
supporting technology, the problem remains open. This paper explores the
feasibility of using touchless hand gestures (THG) during lectures in order to
promote and ease the students' participation, and thus increasing their
interactivity. Particularly, this work focuses on supporting the students'
participation from their own spot in the classroom, as a strategy to help them
feel comfortable and increase their participation during lectures. After
conducting a literature review, no proposals or guidelines helping developers
create THG-based applications to support such a participation strategy for the
classroom scenario were found. Therefore, the authors used the literature
review and their own experience to define a set of design aspects that should
be considered when developing this type of applications. The suitability of
this design guideline was evaluated with a user study with two applications.
The quantitative and qualitative results show the students' participation from
their spot could be feasible of being used in practice and it could increase
the interaction during lectures. Moreover, the proposed design guidelines are
shown to be suitable to support the development of these applications.