Proposals for the promotion of computing in K-12 studies in Spain

The information society requires new skills and knowledge about how to cope in a computerized world. Although it is fully assumed in the political and social discourse, it is a neglected subject in formal education. Each nation should analyze how computing is learned in its K-12 education system. This research-to-practice paper presents the report carried out in Spain promoted by two academic associations, which analyzes the state of computing education in Spain in K-12 studies, summarizes some elements of the didactics of computing and analyzes the training received by teachers who will train K-12 students. The report also presents some reflections of the working group in charge, and nine proposals for improvement oriented to policy makers are pointed out.This work has been funded by the Departament de Recerca i Universitats de la Generalitat de Catalunya - 2021 SGR 01412,Peer ReviewedObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::4 - Educació de QualitatPostprint (author's final draft

Gamification in higher education and stem : a systematic review of literature

In recent years, gamification, the use of game elements in non-game contexts, has drawn the attention of educators due to the possibility of making learning more motivating and engaging; this led to an increase of research in the field. Despite the availability of literature reviews about gamification and its effects, no work to this date has focused exclusively on Higher Education (HE). Next, worldwide there is an increasing demand for skilled Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals that meet the challenges related to scientific and technological innovations of the 21st Century. This lead to the need of strengthening STEM Higher Education. This brings us to the purpose of this work: presenting a systematic literature review of empirical studies about gamification STEM related Higher Education. This review study started from a systematic mapping design of 'Web of Science' articles, with following inclusion criteria: empirical gamification studies set up in HE, published between 2000 and 2016; focusing on undergraduate or graduate students; in the STEM knowledge field, and set up in authentic settings. An initial search resulted in 562 potentially relevant articles. After applying all selection criteria, only 18 studies could be retained. 12 additional articles were included by analyzing references from earlier literature reviews, resulting in 30 studies to be included. Analysis results show how a combination of game elements (e.g. leaderboards, badges, points and other combinations) positively affects students' performance, attendance, goal orientation and attitude towards mostly computer science related subjects. The analysis results also point at a lack of studies in certain STEM areas, a lack of studies that identify the particular game element associated with the positive differential impact on student performance; a lack of validated psychometric measurements, and lack of focus on student variables that could/should be taken into account as mediating/moderating variables clarifying the impact of gamification in the HE focus on STEM learning and teaching

Evaluation in a project life‐cycle: The hypermedia CAMILLE project

In the CAL literature, the issue of integrating evaluation into the life‐cycle of a project has often been recommended but less frequently reported, at least for large‐scale hypermedia environments. Indeed, CAL developers face a difficult problem because effective evaluation needs to satisfy the potentially conflicting demands of a variety of audiences (teachers, administrators, the research community, sponsors, etc.). This paper first examines some of the various forms of evaluation adopted by different kinds of audiences. It then reports on evaluations, formative as well as summative, set up by the European CAMILLE project teams in four countries during a large‐scale courseware development project. It stresses the advantages, despite drawbacks and pitfalls, for CAL developers to systematically undertake evaluation. Lastly, it points out some general outcomes concerning learning issues of interest to teachers, trainers and educational advisers. These include topics such as the impact of multimedia, of learner variability and learner autonomy on the effectiveness of learning with respect to language skills

Context-aware Assessment Using QR-codes

In this paper we present the implementation of a general mechanism to deliver tests based on mobile devices and matrix codes. The system is an extension of Siette, and has not been specifically developed for any subject matter. To evaluate the performance of the system and show some of its capabilities, we have developed a test for a second-year college course on Botany at the School of Forestry Engineering. Students were equipped with iPads and took an outdoor test on plant species identification. All students were able to take and complete the test in a reasonable time. Opinions expressed anonymously by the students in a survey about the usability of the system and the usefulness of the test were very favorable. We think that the application presented in this paper can broaden the applicability of automatic assessment techniques.The presentation of this work has been co-founded by the Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

Comparison of Existing Computing Curricula and the New ACM-IEEE Computing Curricula 2013

The ACM-IEEE Computing Curricula 2005 was published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the Computer Society (IEEE-CS). After few years and many updates, the new version was published at the end of 2013 year. This last version can be named ACM-IEEE Computing Curricula 2013 (CC2013). In this paper, we present a comparison of the computing curricula degree programs from five countries (Ecuador, France, Germany, Poland and Spain) and the CC2013. The comparison takes into account both the duration and the content of the studies. This comparison can provide several benefits. Firstly, this comparison highlights the differences that exist among the five analysed countries; it can be used to define correspondence tables between different degree programs. Secondly, this comparison also shows the differences from the CC2005 and the following updates (e.g. CC2013) and it shows what should be changed to align with the latest updates.This work has been partially supported by the Prometeo Project by SENESCYT, Ecuadorian Government. This work has been partially supported by the GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03) project from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness