Jun
20
The BEACONING project at #SpinUOC On June 16th Pau Yanez, CEO of Geomotion Games, presented the BEACONING project at SpinUOC event organized by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). #SpinUOC is the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya’s (UOC) transferable knowledge event to present the innovative solutions produced by startups in Catalonia to society and industry.
Augmented and virtual reality; social mobile applications; art, culture and leisure; collaborative consumption or educational games are just some of the areas covered by this year’s star projects.
Read More
Jun
14
Engaging participation in workshops and classrooms can be very challenging, especially in an age where knowledge and information is accessible online 24/7 and interactive and immersive technologies on mobile phones and tablets constantly compete for attention. Gamification of classrooms and workshops is neither new nor difficult. Good teachers have used games psychology and mechanics long before modern technologies came on to the scene.
The use of some of the strategies, elements and influencers I describe in various Slideshare White papers such as http://www.slideshare.net/dwortley/the-gamification-elements-glossary not only help to make learning more fun but also more effective. Here are a few of the gamification elements I use in workshop and classroom environments.
Read More
Jun
14
Some years ago I was invited to be a judge in a national competition run in the USA by a charitable organisation called HASTAC (www.hastac.org). The competition was targeted at young people and its objective was to encourage kids to develop games which could create learning activities for STEM (Science, Technology, Education and Maths) subjects.
STEM subjects, over recent years, have been a problem for educators because young people today are more interested in media, arts and humanities than science which is perceived as “boring”. The lack of interest in science, technology, engineering and maths is fairly recent phenomenon which could easily form the basis of a research study in its own right. My own instinctive perspective of the reasons why a nation like the UK, with all its long and distinguished history of scientists, engineers and mathematicians, should begin to lose interest in these traditions is that modern technologies are so well developed and reliable that there have been limited opportunities for young people to create, explore and tinker with mechanical and electrical devices. As a consequence, because our inherent human desire to be challenged to solve problems and push back frontiers has had more restricted opportunities, young people have gravitated to disciplines where they can explore their creativity and ability to shape the world around them. This may also help to explain why “Jam” and “Maker” sessions and raw devices like Raspberry Pi are so successful because they create a sandbox for creativity with technology and engineering in similar way to which “Meccano” sets used to do in my youth.
Read More
Jun
6
In a country like France, over 140 000 secondary school students drop out every year with no qualifications whatsoever. The annual cost of this academic failure is estimated at about 24 billion Euros. The main reason behind this dropout is the passage from primary school, where the children tend to be closely accompanied to secondary school where students are more or less left to their own devices. The main role of the secondary school teacher is to simply transmit knowledge, without resorting to a personalized educational approach. This teaching method, based on a grade system, often prevents children from progressing and tends to dishearten the weaker ones. Unfortunately this is the case in many European countries
Read More
Jun
2
First BEACONING pilot scenarios described using the BEACONING taxonomy proposed to model the scenario then been able to use them with the authoring tool.
The two samples proposed scenario by ORT are related to digital skills and Mathematics for helping in particular students passing the gap between high school and first year of university/technical and vocational studies. The Maths scenario topic is about “Basic algebrix skills” and is targeting High school students in a difficult situation math wise.
Read More
