Children challenging the design of half-baked games: Expressing values through the process of game modding

In this paper we look at the potential educational value of placing children in a dual role of identifying and changing rules and values embedded in digital games by hacking them. Children’s participation in the design of learning technologies is a difficult challenge to address, due to limitations in children’s domain-knowledge around which these technologies are developed. Their role in the design process is thus usually limited to that of a user or tester. In this paper we discuss the role of children as “hackers” of what we call ‘half-baked’ games. By hacking a pedagogically engineered half-baked game in order to improve or change it, children are expected to challenge the values, the mechanics and the rules of a fully functioning, but faulty, or inappropriate game originally designed to provoke students to modify it. This discussion uses an example of children modding such a game provocatively called ‘PerfectVille’, which was specially designed to raise problems around the issue of urban sustainability. The game itself was designed with the use of a GIS rule-based authoring tool for game design called ‘sus-x’. The children grappled with both value-laden issues and concepts embedded in the tool they used. The issue of taking children’s values into account but also of helping them to build understandings of wider contested societal values can be addressed by studying the process by which children design and change games affording such experiences. It also illuminated their own perspective and values, which they embedded in the games

Participatory design to lower the threshold for intelligent support authoring

One of the fundamental aims of authoring tools is to provide teachers with opportunities to configure, modify and generally appropriate the content and pedagogical strategies of intelligent systems. Despite some progress in the field, there is still a need for tools that have low thresholds in terms of the users’ technical expertise. Here, we demonstrate that designing systems with lower entry barrier can potentially be achieved through co-design activities with non-programmers and carefully observing novices. Following an iterative participatory co-design cycle with teachers who have little or no programming expertise, we reflect on their proposed enhancements. Our investigations focus on Authelo, an authoring tool that has been designed primarily for Exploratory Learning Objects, but we conclude the paper by providing transferable lessons, particularly the strong preference for visual interfaces and high-level pedagogical predicates for authoring analysis and feedback rules

Metafora: A Web-based Platform for Learning to Learn Together in Science and Mathematics

This paper presents Metafora, both a platform for integrated tools as well as an emerging pedagogy for supporting Learning to Learn Together in science and mathematics education. Our goal is to design technology that brings education to a higher level; a level where students not only learn a subject matter, but also gain a set of critical skills needed to engage in and self-regulate collaborative learning experiences in science and math education. We first discuss the core skills we hope students will gain as they learn to learn together. We then present our design and implementation that can achieve this goal; a platform and pedagogy we have developed to support the learning of these skills. Finally, we present an example use of our system based on results from pilot studies that demonstrates interaction with the platform, and potential benefits and limitations of the tools in promoting the associated skills

Activity Plan Template: A Mediating Tool for Supporting Learning Design with Robotics

Although Robotics have been designed for education for several decades now, only recently they started being broadly used in education, formal and non formal. In this context many different technologies have emerged accompanied by relevant learning material and resources. Our observation is that the vast number of learning activities is driven by multiple “personal pedagogies” and thus it results in the fragmentation of the domain. To address this problem we discuss in the paper the construct of “activity plan template”, a generic design tool that will facilitate different stakeholders (teachers, instructors, researchers) to design learning activities for different robotic toolkits. In the paper we discuss the characteristics of the activity plan template and the research process of generating such a template. Since we report work in progress, we present here the first version of the activity plan template, the construction of which is based on a set of best practices identified

Learning Programming with Educational Robotics: Towards an Integrated Approach

Despite the fact that it has been a few years since robotics entered the school and offered new learning opportunities, educational robotics usually is offered in the context of extra-curricular activity (e.g. a “club”) which addresses a limited number of students and participation is based on student personal interest. In this paper we explore the potential of ER when it is integrated in the typical school curriculum. In the study we report here, we integrated ER in the computer science curriculum and all students of a 9th grade class engaged with robotics activities. The rationale underlying the study is that robotics can be used as a medium to motivate students in engaging with programming and support them to negotiate real life problems. Analysis of the data collected, indicate that ER when integrated with the computer science curriculum, can create a rich learning environment where programming is contextualized and students are highly motivated to engage and negotiate important STEM concepts

The merger of vertically offset quasi-geostrophic vortices

We examine the critical merging distance between two equal-volume, equal-potential-vorticity quasi-geostrophic vortices. We focus on how this distance depends on the vertical offset between the two vortices, each having a unit mean height-to-width aspect ratio. The vertical direction is special in the quasi-geostrophic model (used to capture the leading-order dynamical features of stably stratified and rapidly rotating geophysical flows) since vertical advection is absent. Nevertheless vortex merger may still occur by horizontal advection. In this paper, we first investigate the equilibrium states for the two vortices as a function of their vertical and horizontal separation. We examine their basic properties together with their linear stability. These findings are next compared to numerical simulations of the nonlinear evolution of two spheres of potential vorticity. Three different regimes of interaction are identified, depending on the vertical offset. For a small offset, the interaction differs little from the case when the two vortices are horizontally aligned. On the other hand, when the vertical offset is comparable to the mean vortex radius, strong interaction occurs for greater horizontal gaps than in the horizontally aligned case, and therefore at significantly greater full separation distances. This perhaps surprising result is consistent with the linear stability analysis and appears to be a consequence of the anisotropy of the quasi-geostrophic equations. Finally, for large vertical offsets, vortex merger results in the formation of a metastable tilted dumbbell vortex.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Feedback Authoring for Exploratory Activities: The Case of a Logo-Based 3D Microworld

This paper presents AuthELO an authoring environment that can be used for the configuration of logging and authoring of automated feedback for exploratory learning objects (ELOs). ELOs are web components (widgets) that can be integrated with learning platforms to synthesise highly interactive learning environments. AuthELO has been developed in the context of the MCSquared project that is developing a platform for authoring interactive educational e-books. This platform comprises an extendable set of diverse widgets that can be used to generate instances of exploratory activities that can be employed in various learning scenarios. AuthELO was designed and developed to provide a simple, common and efficient authoring interface that can normalise the diversity of these widgets and give the ability to non-experts to easily develop or customise the feedback that is provided to students using a data-driven approach. In this paper we describe the architecture and design characteristics of AuthELO and a small-scale evaluation with activities in a logo-based 3D microworld called Malt+. We reflect on both the challenges of the authoring process and the pedagogical potential of the feedback when these activities are used by students

Learning from multimedia and hypermedia

Computer-based multimedia and hypermedia resources (e.g., the world wide web) have become one of the primary sources of academic information for a majority of pupils and students. In line with this expansion in the field of education, the scientific study of learning from multimedia and hypermedia has become a very active field of research. In this chapter we provide a short overview with regard to research on learning with multimedia and hypermedia. In two review sections, we describe the educational benefits of multiple representations and of learner control, as these are the two defining characteristics of hypermedia. In a third review section we describe recent scientific trends in the field of multimedia/hypermedia learning. In all three review sections we will point to relevant European work on multimedia/hypermedia carried out within the last 5 years, and often carried out within the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence. According to the interdisciplinary nature of the field this work might come not only from psychology, but also from technology or pedagogy. Comparing the different research activities on multimedia and hypermedia that have dominated the international scientific discourse in the last decade reveals some important differences. Most important, a gap seems to exist between researchers mainly interested in a “serious” educational use of multimedia/ hypermedia and researchers mainly interested in “serious” experimental research on learning with multimedia/hypermedia. Recent discussions about the pros and cons of “design-based research” or “use-inspired basic research” can be seen as a direct consequence of an increasing awareness of the tensions within these two different cultures of research on education

Teachers’ conceptions of learning philosophies: discussing context and contextualising discussion

With the introduction of any new initiative into the mathematics classroom, there is often an assumption that it will produce visible and measurable effects in teaching approaches and pupil progress. Yet, there is a body of research that tempers such optimism, drawing attention to a series of mitigating factors, for example, the deep-seated nature of teachers’ practices, their implicit or stated beliefs and values, and their lack of detailed awareness of how they perform in the classroom. Rather than make associative links between these factors and the success of the initiative, our intention is to examine the ways in which teachers are trying to interpret what the new scheme requires of them and how in turn, engaging with it causes them to re-describe both their pedagogic understanding and classroom practices relationally to earlier approaches. Employing data from a small project, we seek to examine four teachers’ moves to grapple with this attempted shift from one teaching paradigm to another by considering how certain key terms serve to anchor the teachers’ conceptions of themselves during this transition and find that their responses can be idiosyncratic and varied depending on the approaches in which they have been previously embedded. By using theoretical ideas from some neo-Marxist writers we examine these discursive shifts and their relevance to conceiving curriculum change. We suggest that the individual’s teaching practice develops as a result of it being understood and enacted through a succession of ideological filters, each adding to the cumulative experience of the teacher

Children's inductive thinking during intrinsic and Euclidean Geometrical activities in a computer programming environment

This paper presents a case study investigating the knowledge constructed by two 12 year-old children working with a geometrical Logo microworld allowing the Logo turtle to measure distances, and turns relative to previously constructed points on the plane. A qualitative analysis of data consisting of everything that the children said, typed and wrote on paper during the 15 hours of the research, provided evidence of the children's developing use of concepts belonging to Plane Geometry. The measuring of angular and length quantities, enabled them to conjecture, reflect on and manipulate triangle properties and relations traditionally associated with Euclidean Geometry. Their developing awareness of the existence of geometrical relations in their work, encouraged an increase in their readiness to use and reflect on them. The paper concludes that the generation of learning environments such as the above may well enhance the opportunity for children to form inductive geometrical understandings. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers