SMART Spaces: Chemistry Teaching - Pilot report

The SMART Spaces Chemistry Teaching programme (SMART Spaces Chemistry Teaching) aims to improve the factual recall of pupils in order to free up lesson time so that teachers can spend more time on pedagogies that embed and extend knowledge—such as practical work and discussion—to improve pupils’ abilities to analyse and evaluate science. This project aimed to see if the programme leads to teachers being able to change the content and practice of their teaching so as to increase time allocated to application and evaluation in chemistry teaching. The programme is a whole-class programme delivered by GCSE science teachers to all pupils undertaking AQA combined award science in Year 10. It is an adapted version of SMART Spaces: Spaced Learning Revision programme (SMART Spaces Revision). SMART Spaces Revision is conducted in the weeks before GCSE examinations whereas the teaching version is conducted during science lessons throughout the year. Delivery is timed to prime pupils in new content and reinforce recall of taught content through ‘spaced learning’. This involves using a scripted presentation to deliver three lots of condensed chemistry content, each lasting 12 minutes, with ten minutes of spacing activity in between. This is repeated in three consecutive lessons, a day apart, termed ‘blocks’, three times across the year. Professional development training is delivered to heads of department and teachers of chemistry by a trainer experienced in the delivery of SMART Spaces. It involves a half-day workshop followed by an in-school coaching visit. Teaching resources are provided, including scripted slides covering the entire GCSE combined science chemistry curriculum, a SMART Spaces manual, and guidelines to develop teaching to maximise the benefit of the additional time created by improved pupil recall. This evaluation was a pilot, which commenced in September 2018 and finished in December 2019. Due to initial delays at start up, during the pilot the project was extended from one academic year to four terms: three in Year 10 and one in Year 11. Some schools were not able to continue with the pilot and new schools were recruited to replace them. This meant that some schools were unable to deliver a fourth block of sessions in the fourth term and some could not complete delivery of three blocks as they started the project later. In total, 12 schools were recruited and undertook training of which nine delivered the intervention. Within these nine, 26 teachers and 714 pupils were involved in the project. The evaluation followed pupils as they moved from Year 10 into Year 11 (ages 14 to16). The evaluation aimed to assess the promise of the intervention according to the theory of change, feasibility, and readiness of the programme for trial. UCL’s Institute of Education undertook the evaluation, which involved a mixed-methods implementation and process evaluation (IPE) using surveys, interviews, and observations with teachers and pupils. The intervention was developed by a team from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and Hallam Teaching School Alliance (HTSA). The project was co-funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Wellcome

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

Architectural implications for context adaptive smart spaces

Buildings and spaces are complex entities containing complex social structures and interactions. A smart space is a composite of the users that inhabit it, the IT infrastructure that supports it, and the sensors and appliances that service it. Rather than separating the IT from the buildings and from the appliances that inhabit them and treating them as separate systems, pervasive computing combines them and allows them to interact. We outline a reactive context architecture that supports this vision of integrated smart spaces and explore some implications for building large-scale pervasive systems

SMART Spaces: Spaced Learning Revision Programme - Evaluation Report

SMART Spaces: Spaced Learning Revision Programme (SMART Spaces Revision) aims to raise attainment in GCSE chemistry by improving revision using ‘spaced learning’. Spaced learning involves teachers repeatedly delivering the same content, across multiple sessions, with breaks in between. The programme, developed and delivered by Hallam Teaching School Alliance (HTSA) and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), trains teachers to deliver six highly structured and manualised chemistry revision lessons for the AQA Combined Science GCSE. Lessons are provided to Year 11 pupils (age 15 to 16) in the three-week period prior to GCSE examinations. Each lesson consists of three 12-minute episodes delivering content separated by two ten-minute spacing activities such as juggling. Lessons are delivered on three separate days, which allows additional spaces of around 24 hours between content repetition. The first three lessons repeatedly cover one half of the curriculum and the second three lessons repeatedly cover the other half. SMART Spaces Revision training involves a lead teacher who supports implementation and chemistry teachers who receive a day of instruction (in twilight sessions). In-school follow-up support and teaching resources are also provided. Resources include PowerPoint slides covering the entire chemistry curriculum content for the AQA Combined Science award together with a manual, an activity pack, and spacing materials. This project was a two-armed, cluster-randomised controlled efficacy trial (c-RCT) with 125 schools from across England: 54 schools were randomly allocated to receive the intervention and 71 acted at the ‘business as usual’ control group; 14,098 pupils from Year 11 taking the AQA Combined Science GCSE took part in the trial. The evaluation tested the impact of the intervention on GCSE chemistry attainment with surveys and interviews with teachers and pupils and observations of training informing the process evaluation. The evaluation was conducted by the IOE at UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society and delivery occurred between April and May 2019

Suspicious Transactions in Smart Spaces

IoT systems have enabled ubiquitous communication in physical spaces, making them smart Nowadays, there is an emerging concern about evaluating suspicious transactions in smart spaces. Suspicious transactions might have a logical structure, but they are not correct under the present contextual information of smart spaces. This research reviews suspicious transactions in smart spaces and evaluates the characteristics of blockchain technology to manage them. Additionally, this research presents a blockchain-based system model with the novel idea of iContracts (interactive contracts) to enable contextual evaluation through proof-of-provenance to detect suspicious transactions in smart spaces

First Smart Spaces

This document describes the Gloss software currently implemented. The description of the Gloss demonstrator for multi-surface interaction can be found in D17. The ongoing integration activity for the work described in D17 and D8 constitutes our development of infrastructure for a first smart space. In this report, the focus is on infrastructure to support the implementation of location aware services. A local architecture provides a framework for constructing Gloss applications, termed assemblies, that run on individual physical nodes. A global architecture defines an overlay network for linking individual assemblies. Both local and global architectures are under active development

Applying End User Software Product Line Engineering for Smart Spaces

Smart spaces are physical environments equipped with pervasive technology that sense and react to human activities and changes in the environment. End User Development (EUD) skills vary significantly among end users who want to develop software applications for their smart spaces. This paper presents a systematic approach for adopting reuse in EUD for smart spaces by using Software Product Line (SPL) concepts. End User (EU) SPL designers develop EU SPLs for smart spaces whereas end users derive their individual smart space applications from these SPLs. In particular, this paper presents a systematic approach for EU SPL designers to develop EU SPLs and end users to derive software applications for their spaces, an EUD environment that supports EU SPL development and application derivation, and a testing approach for testing EU SPLs and derived applications

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Surveying human habit modeling and mining techniques in smart spaces

A smart space is an environment, mainly equipped with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, able to provide services to humans, helping them to perform daily tasks by monitoring the space and autonomously executing actions, giving suggestions and sending alarms. Approaches suggested in the literature may differ in terms of required facilities, possible applications, amount of human intervention required, ability to support multiple users at the same time adapting to changing needs. In this paper, we propose a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that classifies most influential approaches in the area of smart spaces according to a set of dimensions identified by answering a set of research questions. These dimensions allow to choose a specific method or approach according to available sensors, amount of labeled data, need for visual analysis, requirements in terms of enactment and decision-making on the environment. Additionally, the paper identifies a set of challenges to be addressed by future research in the field