Working towards fostering programming acceptance in the everyday lives of older and adult people with low levels of formal education:a qualitative case study

With the ever-increasing development of digital technologies, understanding their acceptance or rejection is important. A great deal of research, led by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), shows that technology acceptance is a hot and complex topic. Much of it has been quantitative and operationalized within mandatory—workplace/organizational—contexts, where instrumental aspects of technology use (e.g., efficiency and productivity) play a central role. In this chapter, we report on a qualitative case study—based on 3 in-person learning courses—of factors that can help us foster programming acceptance in the everyday lives of older and adult people with low levels of formal education. We discuss the relative relevance of technology acceptance constructs, showing that perceived ease-of-use is much less relevant than perceived usefulness, because all participants had to find the fit of programming in their lives. We show that two social aspects—the figure of the course instructor and the group—were key to introduce programming and encourage decision-making. We also discuss some methodological issues, such as the difficulties in asking validated items of TAM (e.g. “I have the knowledge necessary to use the system”) to our participants

Indications for Kinesthetic Learning Through Haptic Devices

Haptic technology can provide a sense of touch, either by force feedback or by different vibrations, to give different sensations to the user. It can be used in conjunction with 3D virtual reality or augmented reality environments to give improved perceptions of reality with the additional sensation of touch. This type of haptic enhanced interface can provide a sense of reality in different domains, such as 3D painting, brush-based models, calligraphy, dentistry, or training and learning in different subject fields (Perry et al. 2017; Shenoy and Shenoy 2013). There are a number of studies on the learning effectiveness of haptic systems which report how a greater sense of immersion in a learning environment can promote deep conceptual learning for difficult concepts. Haptic feedback can assist the development of fine motor skill performance in dentistry (Perry et al. 2017) and in other medical areas