German Carro

The color of the light: A remote laboratory that uses a smart device that connects teachers and students

Technology surrounds us wherever we look, nonetheless it is necessary to facilitate its use in places where a greater public can enjoy, know and learn with it. Techno Museum and Go Lab projects are focused on this goal. As a first prototype to bring technology closer to young students and schools, UNED has developed a Arduino based smart device that facilitates the integration of remote laboratories in learning scenarios. Initially, the Arduino smart device was designed for robotics laboratories, but finally it was decided to expand it to other laboratories. The current prototype is called RGB led: “The color of the light” laboratory. This paper presents its use by teachers and their potential applications as a tool to bring technology to schools and young people who tomorrow will become engineers, scientists and curious citizens.

Middleware solutions for service-oriented remote laboratories: A review

The evolution of Web 3.0 and consequently eLearning 3.0 have demanded a major change of the way learning objects are provided and implemented. It is foreseen that learning objects in eLearning 3.0 should be interoperable and easily discovered, and will represent any kind of virtual or physical object. Several approaches attempted to implement remote Laboratories as a Service (LaaS) in order to achieve such interoperability and to allow their integration into heterogeneous educational systems for pedagogical purposes and for more convenience, as well as, their coupling and mashing up with other learning objects in order to yield a scaffold and rich educational environment. This paper provides a broad study on the available middleware solutions for service-oriented remote laboratories implementation, emphasizing the pros and cons of each and the upcoming challenges in developing service-oriented remote laboratories.

Home-made robotic education, a new way to explore

Robotic Education is becoming very popular these days. Simple robots are being used within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Education as a powerful tool which eases the way to teach STEM knowledge. Additionally, Robotics also provide an attractive manner to transform boring concepts into an amusing learning process. Along this paper, a new way to use robotic is presented. Instead of using robots in classrooms or remote laboratories, the proposal is to use robots at home. Currently, there are some alternatives on order to introduce educational robots at home. Along this article, Crumble is presented as a tool which can be used with the aim of deploying STEM knowledges at home joining adults and children.

Teaching technology with CLIL methodology: A case study

Bilingual English education is increasing in Spain, and especially in Madrid Region. The number of Universities, High Schools and Primary School is higher each year and the demand from Society about this kind of education has made the amount of students involved to grow up exponentially throughout the last decade. In the present paper, the experience in the last two years in the department of Technology of Institute “Ramiro de Maeztu” is described in relation with the technical education of the students attended. CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is the methodology applied to common bilingual subject, but in the case of pre-engineering studies, the methodology is combined with a new perspective of Technology subject focused in innovation and entrepreneurship.

From a Hands-on Chemistry Lab to a Remote Chemistry Lab: Challenges and Constrains

The spread of remote labs in Universities is a current reality. They are strong e-learning tool which allow students to carry out online experiments over real equipment and Universities to have e-learning tools for learning methodologies such as Blended learning and Distance learning. These remote labs are developed for many science fields such as electronic, robotic and physic. Nevertheless it is very difficult to find chemistry remote labs. This paper wants to show the difficulties of choosing a chemistry lab which can become a remote chemistry lab, and a first approach of converting a hands-on chemistry lab to remote one.

Wireless Development Boards to Connect the World

Nowadays, Wireless applications are widely extended in the Scientific, Education and Hobbyist communities. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of some of the most popular boards which allow an ease way to develop a wide range of applications related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in an educational manner. Moreover, the scope is focused on those development boards which allow Wireless communications in order to perform Things which can be integrated into an Internet of Things environment. Arduino WiFi Shield, Arduino Yun Shield, Arduino MKR1000, NodeMCU ESP8266 and Onion Omega have been analyzed, compared and discussed. The analysis has been carried out attending on the Built-in Hardware, the Programmer Interface, the connection possibilities and the Developer Community which is behind the corresponding board.

European Robotics Week to introduce robotics and promote engineering

We present an activity framed within the European Robotics Week event. Robotics and computational practice are ideal tools for developing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pedagogy. A modular and adaptive hands‐on workshop is described in detail. The workshop is based on multiplatform educational robotics content as a first step into the robotics world. Three educational tools are used to introduce examples of robotics applications. The operational details, materials, and examples of activities for selected modules are presented with the expectation that all teachers can adapt these activities to their classes. Despite the small number of students, the experience delivered results that might be useful for other instructors to promote workshops with similar or identical content to generate further benefits. This study demonstrates that it is important to combine theory and practice and include fun tasks that intertwine the challenges of applying theory to problem solving. Furthermore, the results show how the same content can be deployed using three different robotics education tools.

Scratch as Educational Tool to Introduce Robotics

There are many necessities that need to be improved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. The robotics represents a promising educational tool. Nowadays, robotic education tools arise with the aim of promoting the innovation and the motivation of the students during the learning process. Robots are becoming more common in our daily life; thus, it is important to integrate robots at all levels of our society. The aim of this paper is to present the use of Scratch - a widely-used tool - in order to guide educational robotics as the first step in introducing students into robotics. The robotics requires several skills such as systems thinking, programming mindset, active learning, mathematics, science, judgement and decision making, good communication, technology design, complex problem solving and persistence. These skills can be easily developed using Scratch. The obtained outcomes from the educational robotic course demonstrate how children without previous experience in programming or robotics can start learning both through experiences in the classroom. The result of this work shows that it is better to make very easy challenges, to adapt the difficulty to each of the children. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop previous concepts. Moreover, it is necessary to work the design, instead of programming directly. Additionally, it is important to combine theory and practice with the aim of including fun tasks intertwined with the challenges that are posed to apply theory in problem solving.

InnoEscuela, innovation in secondary school technical studies

InnoEscuela is more than a learning experience, a programmed methodology to implement courses related to Technology and Computing which follows an innovative way of teaching. The methodology focuses on Project-based learning and team work. Students organize themselves in teams which are called innovative enterprises and they have to decide to create a solution to a social disadvantage, technical problem, or any other kind of need they perceive. Thats why the core of the courses is focused to practice the whole Technological Innovation process.

Engineering Societies as a vehicle tool for engineering students

This paper describes the importance of Engineering Societies inside the educational environment, focusing on the new learning models that appear in the student branches. This model involves pedagogical methods differents than the more formal ones used in the classrooms. They are based on more informal approaches where learners are the real center of the process and teachers appear just as tutors or learning drivers, providing the required material and support to learners. The paper describes the successful experience of a Student Branch in a University for Distance Education, overcoming the traditional collaboration and interaction lacks that these kinds of institutions own due to its inner organization and learning methodology.