Sep
16
The massive uptake of mobile devices coupled with the evolution of map-based applications has created new opportunities to construct more engaging and more personal learning experiences. The sensors in smartphones and tablets collects information on the user’s position data such as coordinates, altitude, orientation, or speed of movement. Blending this information with knowledge of previous locations visited in real or virtual environments, search history, preferences, and georeferences and provides useful insights for scaffolding new learning experiences. In Pro iOS Geo: Building Apps with Location Based Services, Andreucci lists the following main types of geo services:
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Sep
13
The acronym NEET is nowadays often used to describe a young person ‘Not in Education, Employment, or Training’. Given the lasting harm caused in Europe and also in almost the entire world by the current great economic recession starting in the 2000, more and more people qualify to be described as NEETs. Outcasts of the traditional educational system, they are in dire need of proper teaching and knowledge to facilitate their reinsertion into the world of work.
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Sep
8
The new gaming approach used in PokemonGo game is a great success since people of all age and background, especially young ones are now going outside to play, discover new places, learn to collaborate and also challenge each other’s.
The BEACONING Scenarios based on Geolocation and pervasive learning in which students will have to face challenges in quests and missions can benefit of that new approach by providing outdoor gaming missions to be completed by students thus reinforcing their competencies.
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Jul
25
Playing is free to try, safe to err, no rules of engagement, no necessary equipment, riches. Gaming is costly, requires resources; there are rules, structures, clear definitions of success, even engagement depends on chosen strategy. Educational theory claims playing is constructivist, while gaming is behaviorist, hence only suitable for acquiring lower level skills or training.
Are we sure gaming is good for learning?
Let’s seek the answer elsewhere: Socratic or open-ended questions are a great way to initiate creative thinking, alongside inquiry-based learning. Consider this question “How would life evolve to be, if Earth never rotated?” A room of experts would give quite a different answer to this question, compared to a room of children. That’s what we presume. Experts might stoically conclude that “there won’t be any life at all” and children may cheerfully draw pictures of “creatures that evolved in shadows” while learning quite a bit about evolutionary biology. Is that really the case? Studies on “collaborative inquiry” and “action research” suggest that faced with such open ended tasks, if the students/inquirers don’t have rich enough foundational schemas, they quickly converge to banal, cliché responses. The reason is, in the lack of basic rules (dogmas) they choose their own starting assumptions, and do so very conservatively. So, the responses to the above question turn out to be the opposite: experts ponder about shadows and children explain why there won’t be life! For the less competent to be creative, there has to be some structure to the task, and some indicators for what is expected (such as disclosed rubrics or a constructed response pattern). Then, within the wisely set boundaries they can feel confident enough to be creative. In other words, they play the game.
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Jun
29
During the workshop held by ATS on 16th June 2016 at INESC TEC, Porto, the BEACONING Ecosystem requirements have been discussed. The partners were divided into four teams: Authors, Gamers, UX Designers and Pedagogues.
The main objective of the workshop was to define the key functionalities of the BEACONING Ecosystem components, regarding the needs, limitations, challenges and integration requirements.
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