Board games as a teaching tool for technology classes in Compulsory Secondary Education

Aquest treball estudia la tècnica coneguda com game-based learning, és a dir, l’ús dels jocs com a eina didàctica. Primer que res, es fa recerca sobre els treballs ja existents i es veu que, tot i haver-hi articles sobre game-based learning, és difícil trobar-ne de relacionats amb la tecnologia, més enllà d’ensenyar a programar. A continuació, es revisen els continguts curriculars i les competències de secundària i es relacionen amb alguns jocs de taula ja existents, dels quals es detallen breument les regles de joc. Es veu que hi ha continguts curriculars, pels quals es difícil trobar un joc que hi encaixi. A més a més, es desenvolupa la idea d’un nou joc de taula, basat en el ja existent Party & Co., per treballar alguns dels continguts curriculars pels quals no s’ha trobat cap joc existent que s’hi escaigui. Finalment, s’explica una experiència duta a terme durant el període de pràctiques en el centre escolar al curs de 3r d’ESO. Es disposava de tres grups i en tots tres es va seguir la mateixa programació: classe introductòria expositiva, una sessió de muntatge de robots LEGO, 4 sessions de programació i un petit test. En un dels tres grups, però, es va fer una classe prèvia extra on es va jugar a un joc de taula anomenat RoboRally. Els objectius eren dobles: que aprenguessin la importància de l’algorísmica i que s’ho passessin bé. Els resultats mostren que aquest grup va treballar més i millor. En el treball s’analitzen els resultats obtinguts

Evaluation of existing resources (study/analysis)

Within TACCLE 3 – Coding European Union Erasmus+ KA2 Programme project, a review and evaluation of a set of resources that can contribute to teaching programming to younger children has made. This document represents the TACCLE 3 O4 deliverable entitled “Evaluation of existing resources (study/analysis)”

Online Laboratory Course using Low Tech Supplies to Introduce Digital Logic Design Concepts

This paper describes a Digital Logic Design Laboratory Course developed to engage students with hardware systems within an online setting. This is a junior level core course for students from Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CE) and Electrical Engineering (EE). Hence, the laboratories are designed to provide the hands-on experience of breadboarding, testing and debugging essential to CE and EE while accommodating CS students with no prior hardware experience. Commercially available low-cost electronic trainers (portable workstations) are loaned to the students in addition to basic electronic components. To ensure a strong foundation in debugging, prior to utilizing these workstations, students are introduced to the concepts of design, build, test and debug through everyday stationary supplies and educational toys like Snap Circuits. Results from students\u27 surveys regarding their perception of such an introduction as well as their eventual confidence in breadboarding digital logic systems is discussed. The lab structure in context of the course objectives and its implementation in an online classroom is presented. Some of the student work is included for demonstration

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing: the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large - network of people in the form of an open call.”Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of a start-up: Crowdspirit. The company's concept is based on the outsourcing of the entire R&D process to a community of designers and users, in the domain of consumer electronics. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration mainly to help the company design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present four main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) The emergence of the Crowdspirit business model; (2) The value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3) The challenging of the company's initial business model and (4) The creation of a new business model successively open and closed models. In the discussion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during the work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing : the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large – network of people in the form of an open call.” Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of the company. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration with no other objectives than to help this company to design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present the three main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) elaboration of Crowdspirit business model; (2) value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3)Theoretical framework on business models based on crowdsourcing. In the conclusion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during this work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

Toward alive art

Electronics is about to change the idea of art and drastically so. We know this is going to happen - we can feel it. Much less clear to most of us are the hows, whens and whys of the change. In this paper, we will attempt to analyze the mechanisms and dynamics of the coming cultural revolution, focusing on the «artistic space» where the revolution is taking place, on the interactions between the artistic act and the space in which the act takes place and on the way in which the act modifies the space and the space the act. We briefly discuss the new category of «electronic artists». We then highlight what we see as the logical process connecting the past, the present and our uncertain future. We examine the relationship between art and previous technologies, pointing to the evolutionary, as well as the revolutionary impact of new means of expression. Against this background we propose a definition for what we call «Alive Art», going on to develop a tentative profile of the performers (the «Alivers»). In the last section, we describe two examples of Alive Artworks, pointing out the central role of what we call the "Alive Art Effect" in which we can perceive relative independence of creation from the artist and thus it may seem that unique creative role of artist is not always immediate and directly induced by his/her activity. We actually, emphasized that artist's activities may result in unpredictable processes more or less free of the artist's will

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities