LODE: Global Reasoning on e-Stories for Deaf Children

Abstract. Due to a limited exposition to the language in its spoken form in their first years of life, deaf children lack the primary means of acquiring literacy skills. In this paper, we present LODE, a web-based interactive tool for the literacy of Italian deaf children. LODE proposes written e-stories and elicits children to globally reason on them through interactive exercises, developed with the support of an automated reasoner and a natural language processor. The LODE's users are also invited to collaborate and exchange their productions in an interactive manner

Design and Computational Thinking with IoTgo: What Teachers Think

Computational and design thinking are orthogonal and complementary ways of thinking, which are fundamental for nowadays’ learners and yet taught in isolation. Teachers’ understanding of them can be a barrier to their introduction. This paper reports on an intervention for primary- and secondary-school teachers, introducing them to both forms of thinking through hands-on laboratories, revolving around the IoTgo game-based toolkit. Teachers’ ideas of computational and design thinking were investigated with a questionnaire before and after the intervention. Their answers suggest that the intervention was effective and indicate future work related to computational and design thinking

The evolution of a toolkit for smart-thing design with children through action research

Several workshops use toolkits to engage children in the design of smart things, that is, everyday things like toys enhanced with computing devices and capabilities. In general, the toolkits focus on one design stage or another, e.g., ideation or programming. Few toolkits are created to guide children through an entire design process. This paper presents a toolkit for smart-thing design with children. It revolves around SNaP, a card-based board game for children. The toolkit serves to frame the entire design process and guide them through their exploration, ideation, programming and prototyping of their own smart things. By embracing action research, the toolkit was adopted in actions with children, namely, design workshops. Results of actions were reflected over by considering children’s benefits, and they were used to make the toolkit evolve across cycles of action, reflection and development. The paper reports on the latest evolution cycles, ending with the 2020 cycle for continuing smart-thing design during COVID-19 times. The paper concludes with general reflections concerning action research and design with children, toolkits for framing smart-thing design with children, on-going and future work