Developing interactive e-contents for a mathematic Ersmus+ Project: challenges and experiences

Stimulating students for learning is a regularly recurring theme that never seems finished, remaining in the frontline of teachers’ day to day struggle, and this recurrent factor is exponentiated when the subjects are directly related with Mathematics. In November 2018 the European Project EngiMath started work the development of a common Mathematics course for engineering students from the 6 countries of the consortium – Estonia, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain. This course will be an online course with all the usual features and e-contents, however the project partners have been particularly focused on the pedagogical features and real digital competences when developing all the materials and interactive e-contents. An exhaustive search has been developed for the best way to build interactive content that would stimulate students to improve their basic mathematical skills, dealing with all the time and financial constraints, common to European higher education. This paper will describe, in a detailed way, all the steps of the construction of the theoretical contents, in English, which are the basis of the course proposed by the project and that are now being translated to each of the five distinct mother languages to avoid the frequent interpretation misleading problems for students and other cultural hitches. These e-contents are based on the construction of SCORM packages (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) for the Moodle platform, created over animated presentations to promote students’ interaction and avoid drop out behaviours.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

People-Powered Music: Using User-Generated Tags and Structure in Recommendations

Music recommenders often rely on experts to classify song facets like genre and mood, but user-generated folksonomies hold some advantages over expert classifications—folksonomies can reflect the same real-world vocabularies and categorizations that end users employ. We present an approach for using crowd-sourced common sense knowledge to structure user-generated music tags into a folksonomy, and describe how to use this approach to make music recommendations. We then empirically evaluate our “people-powered” structured content recommender against a more traditional recommender. Our results show that participants slightly preferred the unstructured recommender, rating more of its recommendations as “perfect” than they did for our approach. An exploration of the reasons behind participants’ ratings revealed that users behaved differently when tagging songs than when evaluating recommendations, and we discuss the implications of our results for future tagging and recommendation approaches

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Design, navigation, and structure of a hypermedia application for the teaching–learning of pneumatic engineering design drawing

This article presents a hypermedia application used to study pneumatics that serves to support the lecturer in the lecture hall and as a self-study tool for the student. The reason behind the creation of this application is as follows: currently, there is no application in the market, which is equipped with a navigational system to guide the student through this subject matter, which has a system for self-assessment, and a system to identify those concepts that are of greatest interest or difficulty for the student. The proposed system monitors the time each user spends studying each section, as well as the dates on which each one was studied. Moreover, students are able to monitor their progress in learning the subject matter and identify those areas in which they have to improve. They are also able to simulate any pneumatic circuit in order to check its feasibility or detect any errors. The application has an open, modular structure, which enables changes to be made without its structure being affected. Use of the hypermedia application has supported the tutorial work of lecturers and reduced time spent elaborating on subject matter in the lecture hall, at the same time as facilitating its study

PRIMENA RAČUNARA U POČETNOJ NASTAVI MATEMATIKE

Modern teaching of mathematics follows the development of technology, and tends to introduce new teaching materials into teaching of mathematics in order to bring it closer to pupils. The use of computers is no doubt an innovation in learning and is creatively used in the context of learning in different ways so as to motivate pupils to improve understanding, finding out and adopting of mathematical concepts, phenomena and laws. This paper presents the pedagogical - psychological characteristics of teaching in those organisations where computers have been introduced. Directions regarding the use of computers and multimedia presentations, educational software and distance learning for the modelling of teaching are given in this paper. Special emphasis is put on the possibility of implementing new information technologies in educational process, with the aim of increasing the quality of teaching of mathematics.Savremena nastava matematike prati razvoj tehnologije, te nastoji da u obrazovni proces uvede nova nastavna sredstva kako bi se učenicima približila matematika. Upotreba kompjutera u nastavi bez sumnje predstavlja novinu u učenju i kreativno se upotrebljava u kontekstu učenja na različite načine, za motivaciju učenika, da bi se poboljšalo razumevanje, otkrivanje i usvajanje matematičkih pojmova, pojava i zakonitosti. U ovom radu dat je prikaz pedagoško – psiholoških karakteristika nastave u čijoj organizaciji se primenjuje računar. Date su smernice za modelovanje nastave primenom računara i to upotreba multimedijalnih prezentacija, obrazovnih softvera i učenje na daljinu. Poseban akcenat je stavljen na mogućnosti implementacije nove informacione tehnologije u obrazovni proces, a sve u cilju povećanja kvaliteta nastave matematike

The Seaway Tracker Project

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an interpretation model for the deployment of new media in didactics, taking inspiration from theories coming both from Didactics and Semiotics. State of the art experiences are analysed, in order to evaluate and settle novelties and limits in an adequate context. Finally, the project of a new didactic system is described. This system takes advantage from the expert systems technology and from the latest media format research (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7). It exploits the potential of the new media in terms of enhanced dynamic hypertext navigation and interactivity through the use of semantic data