Rosa Reis

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.

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.

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.

Assessment model for educational collaborative virtual environments

The paper presents an proposal model for assessing the quality of educational collaborative virtual environments. This model is based on the Quantitative Evaluation framework developed by Escudeiro in 2008 and it consists in five phases. The purpose is to establish a theoretical model that highlights a number of relevant set of requirements in relation to the quality in educational collaborative virtual environments in order to facilitate the assessment of educational collaborative virtual environments. It is intended to apply the model during the lifecycle of product development and the selection of environment to support the learning/teaching process.

Real Time Bidirectional Translator of Portuguese Sign Language

The communication with deaf by means of written text is not as efficient as it might seem. In fact, there is a very deep gap between sign language and spoken/written language. The deployment of tools to assist the daily communication 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 and a serious game to promote the learning of the Portuguese Sign Language. The translator from sign language to text employs 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 is 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. As a complement, we also present a serious game directed to assist in the difficult task of learning the Portuguese Sign Language.

A Model for Implementing Learning Games on Virtual World Platforms

The virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of games for learning under platforms virtual worlds has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The development of the games for learning under virtual worlds platforms has as goal to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a development model for implementation of games for learning under platforms virtual worlds. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model includes five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of games for learning. It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro [2], and allows us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence.

Serious Game on Sign Language

The quantity of educational digital content available for the hearing impaired community is very scarce. However, due to extraordinary progress of the new technologies, remarkable opportunities to bring a better quality of life to the public in general arose. Making these opportunities available to those who endure handicap and disabilities is a core concern in todays society and a must to promote equity and inclusion. The target community addressed by our work, the hearing impaired community, has its own language, known as Sign language. The work presented in this paper consists in the development of a game to make the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive. In order to do this, a game was created in which the player controls a character and interacts with various objects and non-player characters with the aim of collecting several gestures from the Portuguese Sign Language. These gestures can then be represented by the character. This allows the user to visualize and learn or train the various existing gestures. To raise the interactivity and to make the game more interesting and motivating, several checkpoints were placed along the level. This will provide the players a chance to test the knowledge they have acquired so far on the checkpoints by using Kinect. A High Scores system was also created as well as a history to ensure that the game is a continuous motivating process as well as a learning process.

Quality Criteria for Educational Games

The development of software products in general and educational games in particular is a very demanding process involving costly resources for long periods of time. Evaluating its quality throughout the development lifecycle contributes to the early identification of imperfections and to improved efficiency. In this paper we discuss a set of quality criteria and a method to assess the quality of educational games. These quality criteria are based on the functional requirements of the system and structured into two groups: general and specific. General criteria refer to the set of criteria that are common to all educational games in a given study area. Specific criteria refer to those criteria particularly addressing a specific educational purpose. We also present a quality model that is based on the software engineering paradigms. This model, called Quantitative Evaluation Framework, provides a quantitative measure for the quality of an educational game.