QuickDraw : Improving Drawing Experience for Geometric Diagrams

Abstract

We present QuickDraw, a prototype sketch-based drawing tool, that facilitates drawing of precise geometry diagrams that are often drawn by students and academics in several scientific disciplines. Quickdraw can recognize sketched dia- grams containing components such as line segments and cir- cles, infer geometric constraints relating recognized compo- nents, and use this information to beautify the sketched dia- gram. Beautification is based on a novel algorithm that iter- atively computes various sub-components of the components using an extensible set of deductive rules. We conducted a user study comparing QuickDraw with four state-of-the-art diagramming tools: Microsoft PowerPoint, Cabri II Plus, Ge- ometry Expressions and Geometer’s SketchPad. Our study demonstrates a strong interest among participants for the use of sketch-based software for drawing geometric diagrams. We also found that QuickDraw enables users to draw precise diagrams faster than the majority of existing tools in some cases, while having them make fewer corrections.