Designing applications for mobile phones: the mobile subject assistant

The rapid adoption rate of mobile phones coupled with advancements in supporting technologies suggests mobile phones may now be a viable tool for classroom use. In this paper we introduce the Mobile Subject Assistant, a proposed mobile phone based course tool. The tool is intended to assist in the delivery of university level subjects with an emphasis on student participation, collaboration and group or project work. We discuss a number of issues related to the design of interfaces for mobile phone applications and briefly describe the design of the interface to the Mobile Subject Assistant.