31,427 research outputs found
A Playful Experiential Learning System With Educational Robotics
This article reports on two studies that aimed to evaluate the effective impact of
educational robotics in learning concepts related to Physics and Geography. The
reported studies involved two courses from an upper secondary school and two courses
froma lower secondary school. Upper secondary school classes studied topics ofmotion
physics, and lower secondary school classes explored issues related to geography.
In each grade, there was an “experimental group” that carried out their study using
robotics and cooperative learning and a “control group” that studied the same concepts
without robots. Students in both classes were subjected to tests before and after the
robotics laboratory, to check their knowledge in the topics covered. Our initial hypothesis
was that classes involving educational robotics and cooperative learning are more
effective in improving learning and stimulating the interest and motivation of students.
As expected, the results showed that students in the experimental groups had a far
better understanding of concepts and higher participation to the activities than students
in the control groups
Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think
This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think
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