Tomislav Jagušt

The experiences of setting up, developing and implementing a mobile learning project in Croatia: The SCOLLAm project

This paper problematizes the challenges of setting up a new mobile learning project in a Croatia, a country where technology-enhanced tools in classrooms are not often used due to a number of reasons, two of which are the lack of infrastructure and no teacher professional development. There are three focal points of this paper: designing scalable and durable mobile learning solution, working with teachers in order to ensure an adequate teacher development and creating appropriate digital contents to match primary school level 2, 3 and 4 curriculum. Scalable and durable mobile learning solutions in the context of this project include two main platforms: (1) a mobile learning tablet application for primary school students and (2) a designer application mainly aimed at digital contents designers and producers, to also be easily used by the teachers. On the other side, it describes the processes of strengthening digital competences of the participating school teachers, including technology competence, leadership capacity and technology supported curricular innovation processes. Thirdly, the issues of design and implementation of digital lessons are explored with a special focus on digitalization of the existing non-digital lessons together with the teachers, wherever appropriate and feasible. As a result, conceptual prototypes of digital lessons are produced to be analyzed and discussed amongst teachers and researchers, after which the selected ones get integrated into digital lessons for tablet computer. In addition to describing the threefold process and the accompanying issues, the paper presents preliminary experiences and results in this novel research initiative, sets up mid-term goals and proposes and adequate methodology in achieving the project goals.

Examining competitive, collaborative and adaptive gamification in young learners' math learning

Abstract This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted on three different types of gamified learning activities—namely competitive, collaborative, and adaptive—in lower primary mathematics classes. The participants were students from two second-grade and one third-grade classes who used tablet computers and digital learning lessons for learning mathematics. The study included a non-gamified and competitive, adaptive, and collaborative gamified conditions, which were integrated into lesson plans. The collected log data were used to calculate the changes in performance levels through the dimensions of task completion and time under each condition, and the data were further analyzed and compared across conditions. The quantitative analysis results were triangulated with interview data from the students. Overall, the results show that gamified activities contributed to increased student performance levels in math learning. Significantly higher performance levels appeared in a gamified condition combining competition, a narrative, and adaptivity with individual performance game elements. Although the highest performance levels appeared in conjunction with the most incorrect attempts by the students, the total number of correct attempts was unaffected. Our findings suggest that whether gamification works or not is not the result of individual game elements but rather the consequence of their balanced combination.

Using Robotics to Foster Creativity in Early Gifted Education

This paper presents our experiences from workshops with gifted primary school students (grades 2–4) especially in programming with robotics sets (Lego Mindstorms EV3) and other technology. As a part of extracurricular enriched program at the Center for Gifted Child Development in Zagreb, Croatia, we organized a number of robotics and ICT workshops. Main goal of these workshops was to introduce gifted primary school students to computer programming and robotics, teach them some basic programming and mechanics skills, and develop their algorithmic thinking, problem solving and creativity. However, trough lessons, students showed unexpected productive giftedness in specific domains of creativity, with children experimenting with different ideas and designs, discussing inventions or alternative approaches to the given problems, or expressing their visual arts or music talents trough robots and programming tasks.

Implementing the additional knowledge in the Croatian Scientific Bibliography

The Croatian Scientific Bibliography - CROSBI is a bibliography web site that stores information about scientific papers published in Croatia in the last 15 years. At the present, CROSBI consists of over 400,000 records and is daily accessed and updated by a large number of researchers. As the appearance and purpose of database (and hence its structure) changed over the years, some inconsistencies emerged, and existing data could not be used to its fullest potential, e.g. linking papers from the same journal or conference, or analysis of scientific activity in relation to the place of article publication. This paper explores the possibilities of improving and enriching the CROSBI database, using different techniques, from data cleaning and sanity checking, to creating links between CROSBI and similar online bibliographic databases. In order to improve data quality, book records from CROSBI were linked to the corresponding Google Books records, and using Semantic Web technologies, a number of links between CROSBI and online bibliographic databases was created. The resulting data set can be used to further improve the quality of CROSBI by creating a recommender system, or to improve and open up new possibilities in the analysis of existing data.