Andoni Eguíluz

A Tool to Evaluate the Level of Inclusion of Digital Learning Objects

Inclusive learning integrates pedagogical and technological variables. It means to adapt to students according to their characteristics (personal, physical, cognitive, social…), needs and interests. With the aim of evaluating the level of inclusion of digital learning objects we have developed a questionnaire that collects information about pedagogical and technological aspects that promote or discourage inclusion. Features like the pedagogical model, function of activities, type of assessment, multimedia resources, human-computer interaction, accessibility and usability criteria, etc. are variables that impact in the level of inclusion of educational objects and items that have been included in the questionnaire. This is the second version of the tool, refined with the conclusions obtained from the application of the draft version to more than 50 learning objects developed under the funding and supervision of the Basque Government. These objects are available under Creative Commons license in the Agrega web page of the Education Department, and represent the style and characteristics of more than 350 objects.

A serious game to develop and assess teamwork competency

In this paper we present the main basis of teamwork competency, and how we integrate its development and assessment in a serious game we are developing at the University of Deusto. We describe the game-design process, methodology used, and how it affects the final design. Some of the analyzed aspects of gamification are also pointed out. It describes how we include development mechanisms to assess and monitor teamwork competency. The game collects, without interfering with the user, the necessary data to measure teamwork competency, and to enable the complete analysis of the project within the company in which it is used.

Augmented Reality for maintenance operator training using SURF points and homography

We present a system, PortableAR, that aims to provide Augmented Reality (AR) to diverse environments, like guided tourism visits or industrial maintenance tasks. The first version relied on AR tags and had low accuracy while the last version provides a successful AR experience using SURF and homography.

Smartphones and teenagers, threat or opportunity

Within the 3rd International Digital Citizenship Conference celebrated in San Sebastian-Spain in May 8th, we took part in a round table debate about the use of Smartphone in education with teenagers. There is an open discussion about the benefits or threats of using such an innovative technology. Usually the main trend is to forbid the use of mobile phones in the classroom. We bet for considering the use of any technology if it can benefit somehow our learning/teaching process. Smartphones are very powerful devices that can be used in many innovative ways. We can profit their availability, since many students have one. In this paper we analyze how different authors understand mobile learning, we review previous experiences and their results in educational institutions using mobile learning, and we reflect on the threats and opportunities of using mobile devices in education. Finally we show an approach to a new educational paradigm that is being implemented thanks to the educational revolution derived from the use of mobile devices and we provide simple guidelines for its implementation.

Make World, A Collaborative Platform to Develop Computational Thinking and STEAM

The demand for computer programming professionals in STEAM-related areas has rocketed in the last decade. Initiatives such as the Hour of Code or CodeWeek take advantage of online platforms like Code.org to reach millions of students through a one-hour introduction to computer science and computer programming. Despite the excellent curricular design of Code.org courses, we believe that learners could benefit from a platform where they can create their own programming challenges that can be shared, assessed and remixed by the rest of the users. We named this platform Make World (http://makeworld.eu). After more than one year of use, we studied how students and teachers used this tool to propose and solve learning activities where computational thinking and STEAM skills are developed at the same time. This paper describes the main characteristics of Make World and analyses the use and piloting phase where more than 500 students of primary education have participated to measure the impact of Make World in their learning. The result of this analysis provides a better understanding of the difficulties students face when using a technological platform for STEAM and computational thinking education.

Exploring the progression of early programmers in a set of computational thinking challenges via clickstream analysis

In recent years, many initiatives have aimed to develop basic computational thinking skills. Despite the popularity of online platforms for early programmers, we still lack detailed information to analyze how these skills are acquired. In the present study we analyzed clickstream data from 3,355 participants enrolled in several Computational Thinking workshops using Kodetu, an online platform with fine grained logging features. Participants used Kodetus coding blocks to solve challenges of increasing difficulty while we gathered their clickstream in the platform. Here, we present our findings after evaluating these data in regards of participants’ characteristics (age, sex, previous knowledge), similarity with previously submitted solutions, and degree of discrepancy from the optimal solution. To facilitate collaboration with other researchers in this area, we released our dataset under an open license. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest Computational Thinking-related datasets publicly available.

Acce-Play: accessibility in cinemas

In this paper we present Acce-Play: a system that aims to provide accessible content to all life cycle of films. It is designed to be platform independent and currently allows to play accessible content in cinemas. The content is synchronized with the playing film using audio fingerprinting techniques with the projector audio stream.

Working WITH vs. Working ON Audiovisual Educational Content

We propose the integration of audiovisual content in the whole learning process. Audiovisual not only as a type of content to which the student is passive and needs additional resources to process, comment or work with it, but an interactive material to work on (as we have done traditionally with paper). This is made thanks to ACCEedu, a tool that proposes interactive educational activities based on audiovisual material. It allows tagging, subtitling, audio describing…in short, it enriches audiovisual content with teachers and students contributions.