Paula Escudeiro

Enhancing students team work and communication skills in international settings

Our society is experiencing sudden changes in work organization in part due to the growing ease with which people can collaborate. Many successful cases of peer-to-peer models of organization arise and assume leading positions in world economy replacing, in many cases, the traditional hierarchical organization. People are evolving and interacting within heterogeneous teams composed by members from many different cultural groups and with distinct skills and backgrounds. Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in most engineering curricula. We believe that in such a demanding and culturally diverse environment as the labour market is today, it is essential to promote team work and communication skills at an international and intercultural level. In the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work course, MUTW, students develop their capstone project as members of an international team while working at their home institutions. MUTW projects are to be developed by teams of final-year-undergraduate students from a multinational group of higher education institutions working to solve some engineering problem. Team members are geographically spread to assure heterogeneous teams and to promote international cooperation. This paradigm can be applied in any project/internship course unit. The results from the first edition are very encouraging supporting our initial hypothesis that MUTW significantly promotes students soft skills without requiring any change to prior degree curricula.

Educational software to enhance English language teaching in primary school

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in primary schools allowed to exploit the potential of these technologies as a means of assisting students in their learning process. Nowadays, with the use of ICT, the student is becoming aware of the processes and strategies that use. The present work has the main purpose to improve the teaching/learning process. Thus, the student with difficulties in learning a foreign language acquires initiative and confidence to study and learn. This educational software is intended for a target audience between 8 and 10 years, which will develop a set of activities namely the writing, identify and recognize letters, words, phrases, numbers, and colors. The present educational resource will cover several knowledge fields: Numbers, Colors, Family, Time and Hours, which will be support by different media tools: video, audio, images and text. Each unit curricular has a game, and quizzes in which the child will reply a set of questions, where the degree of difficulty increases throughout the unit curricular. This acquisition of knowledge is done through voice recognition, speech and handwriting. The multimedia contents are displayed with videos and sound. The student can undertake a self-assessment of knowledge acquired through the study of English and the teachers can use the software for assessment.

High-Level Model for Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments Development

The paper presents a proposal high-level model for the development of Educational Collaborative virtual Environments based on engineering software and quality concepts for software development. A life cycle was identified, which was detailed the phases of development, taking into account different techniques and methods and related documentation. The main goal of this research is to demonstrate how we can use the model to develop our applications by virtual worlds platforms. The model was conceived based on research carried out in area the development of models that integrate all phases of process development software and models for assessing collaborative virtual environments. The model used contains a set of diagrams to support developer teams in their tasks, mainly in the creation of educational collaborative virtual environments to be used in an e-learning context.

Portuguese Education Going Mobile with M-Learning

M-learning intend to endorse new forms of learning encouraging the use of mobile technologies, but this purpose is not been fully implemented yet in institutions Portuguese. In this paper, we describe an environment addresses the mobile learning environment. Before we design the environment was investigated existing solutions using mobile technologies to support learning process and analyzed practical implications of design and education when they come into virtual learning environments.

Sustainability of open educational resources: The eCity case

The promotion of Open Educational Resources (OER) as reusable tools for teachers and students is highly relevant but the nature of the income model requires specific strategies to maintain and update those resources. eCity is a city simulation game that supports a Problem Based Learning (PBL) pedagogical methodology in secondary schools and, at the same time, fosters the interest of students in following an Engineering career. The game is freely available through online stores and the generated interest (about 100.000 downloads so far) has raised the need to discuss and adopt a sustainability strategy for the maintenance of the game and the development of new versions. This article presents possible alternatives for that strategy.

Sustainability strategies for open educational resources and repositories

The Open Educational Resources (OER) model was presented as the best way to reinforce the production, sharing and reuse of educational resources in an economically effective way. Educational organizations, content providers, teachers and, in particular, students would be able to benefit from the open and/or free access to these resources. However, OER do cost money to develop, to curate, to maintain and to scale. And this cost is proportional to the OER complexity: interactive applications, games and simulations require much more design, development and maintenance time and technical resources than static lecturing contents like texts and presentation slides. Therefore, specific strategies are required to ensure the sustainability of those resources as a direct income is not expected to be generated out of their use. This article presents an overview of suggested solutions for this issue that have accompanied the actual evolution of the OER model.

Virtual Sign – A Real Time Bidirectional Translator of Portuguese Sign Language

Abstract Promoting equity, equal opportunities to all and social inclusion of people with disabilities is a concern of modern societies at large and a key topic in the agenda of European Higher Education. Despite all the progress, we cannot ignore the fact that the conditions provided by the society for the deaf are still far from being perfect. The communication with deaf by means of written text is not as efficient as it might seem at first. In fact, there is a very deep gap between sign language and spoken/written language. The vocabulary, the sentence construction and the grammatical rules are quite different among these two worlds. These facts bring significant difficulties in reading and understanding the meaning of text for deaf people and, on the other hand, make it quite difficult for people with no hearing disabilities to understand sign language. The deployment of tools to assist the daily communication, in schools, in public services, in museums and other, between deaf people and the rest may be a significant contribution to the social inclusion of the deaf community. The work described in this paper addresses the development of a bidirectional translator between Portuguese Sign Language and Portuguese text. The translator from sign language to text resorts to two devices, namely the Microsoft Kinect and 5DT Sensor Gloves in order to gather data about the motion and shape of the hands. The hands configurations are classified using Support Vector Machines. The classification of the movement and orientation of the hands are achieved through the use of Dynamic Time Warping algorithm. The translator exhibits a precision higher than 90%. In the other direction, the translation of Portuguese text to Portuguese Sign Language is supported by a 3D avatar which interprets the entered text and performs the corresponding animations.

The use of Scratch for the development of 21st century learning skills in ICT

The present work was developed in an educational context and was introduced into the theme of the practical application in a classroom setting of the subject Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação - TIC (Information and Communication Technologies - ICT) with 5th and 6th grade students. All the work presented here was based on two premises: the use of Scratch as a tool and the students as producers of media, which in turn developed their creativity, problem solving skills, and augmented their media literacy and critical thinking aptitude. In this plan of action, we considered three phases: in the 1st phase we evaluated several methodologies for introducing Scratch; in the 2nd phase we focused on collaborative learning in small groups; in the 3rd phase the focus was on developing a game with the whole class. For the duration of this study, it was noticeable that the group of students easily adapted to Scratch. We concluded that the use of this tool motivates students and improves the learning process. It also contributes to a higher level of concentration and promotes collaborative learning. Additionally, it facilitates creativity, dialogue and the overall relationship among students. The teacher quickly understood that this tool allowed the shift into a pedagogic model based on the collaborative construction of knowledge. At the end of this paper there are suggestions of strategies that can be adopted in order to work with Scratch in the classroom. Furthermore, we offer recommendations for possible future projects in this area.

Evaluating virtual experiential learning in engineering

Virtual and Augmented Reality systems offer different ways to immerse users in educational simulations, where they can apply and practice theoretical concepts by interacting with the environment. Therefore these systems can support the Experiential Learning theory that proposes using experiences as the basis for observation, reflection, abstract conceptualization and knowledge construction. In this article, we describe a methodology for integrating these environments in educational engineering settings, providing new and innovative learning methods that reinforce specific competencies, abilities and skills that engineers are required to have. To ensure the effectiveness of this methodology through a rigorous and systematic evaluation process we use QEF, a quantitative evaluation framework. The initial results showed that these tools are effective and students are keen to use it.

Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments: Evaluation Model

In this paper we propose a model for assessing the quality of educational collaborative virtual environments. The objective is to establish a theoretical model that highlights a number of relevant sets of requirements in relation to the quality in educational collaborative virtual environments. It is intended to apply the model during the lifecycle of product development and in the selection of the environment in order to support the learning/teaching process.