Feb
8
On the last day of the Beaconing General Assembly, Mr. Thillay from the French Ministry of Education presented the new roadmap for the French education including the reform oof the lycées and the Baccalaureate and the vocational training. This initiative includes tenders for developing new digital material and solutions. A part of it is a new platform that will provide teaching materials for Cultural of technology and industry of France in the field of
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Feb
7
As part of the validation and improvement process of the Analytics System, a series of experiments have been conducted with teachers and teachers in training testing a serious game. The experiments aimed to validate both the game and the xAPI based Analytics System with future teachers and show them how games can be used as an educational tool in the class, in particular to raise awareness of a certain issue. Participants of the experiments played the game and completed pre-post questionnaires to share their opinions of the whole experiment and to check if the game has changed the perception on the topic
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Dec
22
When I heard for the first time the word STEM education I automatically thought of stem cells, those cells that have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body during early life and growth, but I learned it’s an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – in an interdisciplinary and applied approach, with the sole purpose to teach those four disciplines integrated into a cohesive learning paradigm based on real-world applications. Basically, students learn to use those disciplines in day-to-day life and realize how meaningful and useful they are for them. In U.S. STEM education is more used mostly because along the years students lost interest in these disciplines, focusing more on the philosophical approach in life, even President Obama encouraged the study of STEM in schools emphasising its importance. The basic premise of STEM education is solving problems, first by understanding the natural phenomenon and then solving problems. STEM moves beyond simple class performance and focuses on developing higher-level thinking skills by connecting classroom learning to the real world. The main skills that are vital in STEM are:
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Nov
15
Heriot-Watt University has started its pilots with lecturers and students form Edinburgh college. Amazingly, Students just started the playing the game with no instructions at all! Does this mean our developers have captured their domain requirements spot-on? Although the early observations evidenced the ‘play’ was undoubtedly enjoyable, there is more to the story. Leaving the required minor technical tweaks aside, our researchers realized that the virtual reality and augmented reality raise the expectations to extreme levels, but create an emptiness feeling on the tactile side of experiences, particularly in a task like stone masonry that requires intimacy with the physical world. What will next set of pilots from City of Glasgow College will tell? We now know we are in the right course, we should wait and see.
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Oct
20
Members of the BEACONING project and DMLL staff attended the opening of an exhibition of Augmented reality book reviews. Sylvester Arnab, Michael Loizou, Luca Morini and Mark Lewis assisted in the background research and testing of various Augmented Reality packages which helped Coventry Library select Aurasma as the software to be used in this project.
Primary school students recorded reviews of various books which were accessible by scanning the book covers using a mobile phone or tablet! The students that also attended the exhibition found it very exciting and noted that using Augmented Reality in the books they read made them much more interesting and interactive.
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