Denise Dantas

EXPERIMENTATION WITH MATERIALS TO CREATE CERAMIC PRODUCTS BY MANUAL AND DIGITAL PROCESSES IN A DESIGN WORKSHOP

The advent of affordable 3D printing has provided the possibility for its use in educational settings. Previous studies have demonstrated the benefits and possibilities of these technologies in education [1] [2] [3], and to understand which factors that affect the use of 3D printers in education, an exploratory pilot study was performed, and followed up with a more confirmatory field study. 3D printers were introduced in four different schools in Denmark, and the opportunities and barriers related to the technology were investigated in the pilot study. The participating teachers had responsibility for integrating the technology into their classrooms, and could use them as they found best. Data from the pilot study was gathered from three sources: Semi structured interviews with the participating teachers; open ended questionnaires collected from 67 participating pupils; and field observations of the participating classes. All sources of data were analysed using Robert Yins fivefold method [4]. Although the teachers did have successful instances of teaching with the 3D printers, the researchers found that improvements could be made. Some practical issues were found, such as little printing capacity which resulted in decreased motivation, due to the long waiting time between finishing a design and printing it out. The teachers struggled to plan learning activities that could provide rich and challenging design processes. To better structure a learning activity, a new approach was introduced and tested in the field study, where the printing capacity was also increased. This approach included having the pupils design objects that could be assessed quantitively on two parameters, either by calculations or experimentation, and afterwards plotting the results on a coordinate system. By testing this approach in an authentic teaching situation indications were found that this approach would support the desired rich and challenging design process, but that it could also support learning of many 21 century skills among other learning opportunities.In old industrialised nations such as Sweden, Canada, Australia, Finland, the policy and academic discourse has in recent years centred on the presence of high-tech companies that have academic kno ...

IPTV and cultural probes: A qualitative explorative study for the development of an interface for learning

The distance learning system has an important role to play in development and expansion of education. Use of digital technology in education makes communication, interaction, storage, and distribution of educational content more efficient (AZAMBUJA, 2013). Today, technology and media are very diverse. Internet Protocol Television, IPTV, is a new vehicle for communication and interactive information that makes new distance learning ideas possible. IPTV has become fundamental because they are highly interactive, they deliver synchronous and asynchronous content at a high quality, and offer an expanding range of options to users. Cultural probe can lead to very promissing results as a qualitative IPTV research tool. It is a proposal of a conceptual model of a learning interface for IPTV. The objective of this article is to describe the development and application process and qualitative research results as a way to collect data using cultural probes to develop a proposal for an IPTV education interface to deliver synchrous and asynchronous content to teach engineering, specifically engineering distance learning via IPTV. Objective and tasks were designed in this study for engineering and communication students and electrical and telecommunication engineering teachers to record observations. The results obtained using this technique can help to develop a proposal for an educational interface that will enable IPTV to be used in distance education to teach engineering. The development and application process of the cultural probes in this article had three steps adapted from the method proposed by Mattelmäki [1]: 1) tuning; 2) probe design; 3) interpretation and results. Finally, the main points of the experience were cast and discussed considering the results obtained and the protocol used to collect the data. The methodology encompasses: review of the literature to define the directives to be used in IPTV in distance education based on studies and considerations in the areas of engineering education, participative design, media, and learning; qualitative data were collected using cultural probes; a data analysis report; and a proposal for a conceptual model of an IPTV interface for use in distance education. The results indicate new challenges for qualitative research in the area.