Fiabot!: design and evaluation of a mobile storytelling application for schools

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about how digital technology can be integrated into the formal education system. Within a longitudinal research study, which lasted four years, we conducted an investigation on how mobile technology can support educational activities as defined by a school curriculum. Among the topics included in the school curriculum, we focused on the literary field and developed a Digital StoryTelling (DST) application, Fiabot!, to support this activity. Here, we describe the design of the application and how we evaluated its impact on educational activities. The application was designed and evaluated in two primary schools. The study had the objectives of exploring whether Fiabot! supports children in achieving educational objectives defined by the curriculum, how this effectively supports teachers, and to what extent children like using it for the creation and sharing of their stories. Our findings show that the application has a positive impact on curriculum enactment and effectively supports the related educational activities. Overall, Fiabot! wasdemonstrated to be very effective in stimulating children's discussion of a story's plot and characters. Thus, Fiabot! supported children not only in being creative but also in organizing their work and exploring a digital media opportunity. This resulted in the development of new skills and the better grounding of previously acquired knowledge, while teachers also had the opportunity to expand their teaching skills and get a taste of ICT's potential in education

Getting residents closer to public institutions through gamification

With the huge growth of mobile device users, in recent years, the need and the opportunity to create new digital services and platforms has arisen. These platforms and services not only make people’s daily life easier, but also facilitate and improve communication between institutions and people. Also, new ways of achieving the intended goals are being developed and tested. Gamification is an example, where institutions and people’s communication is encouraged through the offering of incentives/rewards that potentiate involvement with that particular institution. In practice, institutions offer rewards to participants who perform predetermined tasks, for recommendation, dissemination, evaluation or greater involvement of people with that particular institution. The concept of smart cities is also getting huge attention nowadays. Making a city “smart” is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. In this work, we propose a digital solution, in the form of a mobile application, which has as its main goal to improve city hall public services and people’s communication, bringing them closer. This is achieved using gamification techniques that aim to engage residents with city hall services. It is provided a report system that enables residents to communicate to the city hall services, some issues regarding their town that they wish to be solved, such as broken structures, clogged sewers, among others. The proposed system also has a lore that leads to extra motivation to complete missions, be part of player gatherings and events, and meet new people and to better explore the cities’ wonders. An admin platform for the maintenance and administration of the system is also proposed, to better help keeping the application’s content fresh and updated, allowing for a better user experience for the population. The proposed system is being prepared for testing in real environments, the simulation results, as showed in tThis work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT –Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/201

Does digital video enhance student learning in field-based experiments and develop graduate attributes beyond the classroom?

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Geography in Higher Education on 02/05/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03098265.2016.1141186?src=recsysThe connection between fieldwork and development of graduate attributes is explored in this paper. Digital technologies present opportunities to potentially enhance the learning experience of students undertaking fieldwork, and develop core digital attributes and competencies required by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and employers. This paper reports the success of adopting digital video capture in technology-rich field experiments that form part of final year undergraduate courses in Physical Geography at an HEI in New Zealand. Student perceptions were obtained via a range of approaches. Results suggest that deployment of digital video reinforces student learning and connects with core graduate attributes

Endogenous fantasy and learning in digital games.

Many people believe that educational games are effective because they motivate children to actively engage in a learning activity as part of playing the game. However, seminal work by Malone (1981), exploring the motivational aspects of digital games, concluded that the educational effectiveness of a digital game depends on the way in which learning content is integrated into the fantasy context of the game. In particular, he claimed that content which is intrinsically related to the fantasy will produce better learning than that which is merely extrinsically related. However, this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic (or endogenous and exogenous) fantasy is a concept that has developed a confused standing over the following years. This paper will address this confusion by providing a review and critique of the empirical and theoretical foundations of endogenous fantasy, and its relevance to creating educational digital games. Substantial concerns are raised about the empirical basis of this work and a theoretical critique of endogenous fantasy is offered, concluding that endogenous fantasy is a misnomer, in so far as the "integral and continuing relationship" of fantasy cannot be justified as a critical means of improving the effectiveness of educational digital games. An alternative perspective on the intrinsic integration of learning content is described, incorporating game mechanics, flow and representations

Designing an Educational Game: Case Study of ’Europe 2045’

Abstract. This paper presents a theoretical framework, which has been adopted in designing an on-line multi-player strategy game Europe 2045. Europe 2045 is an educational tool for high school social science courses, aimed at familiar-izing students with political, economic, and social issues in contemporary Europe. Apart from learning facts, players develop a range of key skills: discus-sion ability, negotiation, teamwork, and group decision-making. The presented theoretical framework is based on a critical analysis of crucial issues, which seem to determine the success or failure of development and implementation of an educational game in the formal school environment. It demonstrates key ap-proaches the authors of Europe 2045 have adopted in order to overcome already known problems related to game-based learning. On a general level this paper discusses issues related to formal fact learning in educational systems and the possible role of educational games in enhancing these systems

The rise of the citizen author: Writing within social media

The concept of the citizen author is defined and explored within the publishing industry. In order to understand what positions the citizen author currently, and potentially could, hold it begins with a historical view of their rise, including concepts of their eighteenth century antecedents. But the focus of this research is on their growth alongside that of social media platforms. This allows for drawing out relationships between genre fiction, publishers, and the citizen author, which provides a more full understanding of the power dynamics involved when publishers, social media, and the citizen authors mix in the current industry climate.N/

A Participatory Approach to Redesigning Games for Educational Purposes

Even though games designed for educational purposes can be motivating, they usually shelter dated pedagogies, passive learning procedures, and often overlook learners' creativity. In an effort to reinforce the active participation of learners in games, this paper presents a participatory process in which students and teachers are involved in game design. The proposed process concerns redesigning existing commercial games into educational ones and includes establishing the learning goals, identifying appropriate commercial games, adapting the rules and context, crafting and playtesting the game. Using language learning as one application of this process, the paper presents how three well-known tabletop games were redesigned in a foreign language classroom with elementary and intermediate English language learners. The benefits that underlie the process concern students' active participation, boosting their problem-solving skills, and engaging them in creative learning

Mathematical and computer modeling of electro-optic systems using a generic modeling approach

The conventional approach to modelling electro-optic sensor systems is to develop separate models for individual systems or classes of system, depending on the detector technology employed in the sensor and the application. However, this ignores commonality in design and in components of these systems. A generic approach is presented for modelling a variety of sensor systems operating in the infrared waveband that also allows systems to be modelled with different levels of detail and at different stages of the product lifecycle. The provision of different model types (parametric and image-flow descriptions) within the generic framework can allow valuable insights to be gained