weSPOT: A personal and social approach to inquiry-based learning

weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a novel approach for personal and social inquiry-based learning in secondary and higher education. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mash-ups out of cloud based tools and services in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers. This paper presents the research framework of the weSPOT project, as well as the initial inquiry-based learning scenarios that will be piloted by the project in real-life educational settings

Exploration of Factors Affecting Learners' Motivation in E-learning

L

Physics Experiments Planned by The Students Themselves - Higher Secondary Education

[EN] More than 15 years ago we started to implement in our physics curriculum for 17 years old pupils physics experiments planned by students themselves. Each student must learn, how to prepare and perform physics experiment. The leading idea of this endeavor is “student must do, what she/he wants, at least sometimes”. As a most problematic part of this task is, as has been proved, to teach students to formulate a problem - a question, which can be answered by an experiment and also to formulate a hypothesis, a prediction based on the previous knowledge or based on the information gathered from secondary sources. As important we also see the connection of planning experiments to the goals and aims of science education and sensibility of it from the view of pupils and their parents. Planning experiments by students themselves is a task involving a manifold cluster of means of knowledge gathering and utilization. As generally in creativity, the crucial role has memory. The student applies his/her knowledge. But, at the same time, he/she learns, what is the optimal, useful strategy and structure of working, optimal management for a teamwork. Within planning, a student flips through external sources of information, usually, electronic sources or textbooks, focus his/her attention to information interesting or potentially useful for the phenomenon examined by the experiment just planned. Student remembers, what equipment is available, looks for other equipment and material. Of course, the student also learns to write scientifically, to write in a manner, that nothing hampers understanding of the focus, process, and outcomes. Part of the article is devoted to the topic of development abilities of pre-service physics teacher‘s to scaffold the process of planning experiments of their future students.Authors are gratteful to the support from the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract APVV-14-0070.Demkanin, P.; Kováč, M. (2019). Physics Experiments Planned by The Students Themselves - Higher Secondary Education. En INNODOCT/18. International Conference on Innovation, Documentation and Education. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 23-33. https://doi.org/10.4995/INN2018.2018.8767OCS233

An m-leaming game for the study of humanities

Unlike the hard sciences, the study of humanities has not adequately leveraged on technologies such as mobile learning and serious games. Hence, this paper introduces SingaRacer, a mobile learning game to study humanities, specifically, history and culture. The ways in which users might perceive its prospect both as a game as well as an educational application was examined. For this purpose, SingaRacer was evaluated through a user study comprising 52 participants. Their intention to use SingaRacer was generally promising. Implications of the findings are highlighted

Addressing the Leaky Pipeline : A Review and Categorisation of Actions to Recruit and Retain Women in Computing Education

Gender imbalance in computing education is a well-known issue around the world. For example, in the UK and Ireland, less than 20% of the student population in computer science, ICT and related disciplines are women. Similar figures are seen in the labour force in the field across the EU. The term leaky pipeline ; is often used to describe the lack of retention of women before they progress to senior roles. Numerous initiatives have targeted the problem of the leaky pipeline in recent decades. This paper provides a comprehensive review of initiatives related to techniques used to boost recruitment and improve retention among women in undergraduate computer science and computing courses in higher educational institutions. The review covers 350 publications from both academic sources and grey literature sources including governmental guidance, white papers and non-academic reports. It also includes sources in languages other than English. The primary aim was to identify interventions or initiatives (which we have called actions ;) that have shown some effectiveness. A secondary objective was to structure our findings as a categorisation, in order to enable future action discussion, comparison and planning. A particular challenge faced in a significant portion of the work reviewed was the lack of evaluation: i.e. the assessment of the direct relationship between the initiatives undertaken and the outcomes on retention or recruitment. There are only a limited number of studies that include a control group and these tend to focus on one particular intervention or action. In addition often the work presents a number of actions that were implemented and it is difficult to determine which action produced most impact. Considering these challenges, actions were identified that had some level of evaluation with positive impact, including where the evaluation was by measuring feedback. The actions were categorised into four groups: Policy, Pedagogy, Influence and Support and Promotion and Engagement. Policy actions require support and potentially structural change and resources at organisation level. This can be at a department or school level within a higher level institution, and not necessarily just at the higher institution level. Pedagogy related actions are initiatives that are related to the teaching of computer science and technology in terms of curriculum, module delivery and assessment practice. The Influence and Support category includes actions associated with ways to influence women to choose computing at third level and once enrolled to support and encourage them to stay in the field. Finally, Promotion and Engagement actions are initiatives to promote computer science and technology based courses and involve engagement and outreach with external stakeholders such as industry, communities and schools. We present our categorisation, identifying the literature related to actions under each category and subcategory. We discuss the challenges with evaluating the direct impact of actions and outline how this work leads towards the next phase of our work, a toolkit of actions to promote retention and recruitment of women in computing based undergraduate courses. This work will be of interest to third level institutions with STEM faculties, gender-balance policy makers, technical industry players, or any stakeholder in the field of STEM who wishes to understand and implement solutions to the imbalance of women in computing education and beyond