Received: 3 August 2005 Revised: 3 October 2005 Accepted: 3 October 2005 During several years of friendship and joint work with Claudio, starting from the teaching experience we had in the University of Calabria at the beginning of our academic careers, we shared a lot of common moments, friends, interests and experiences. His original way of thinking and the results of his work strongly influe...

The control and coordination of eukaryotic gene expression rely on transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulatory networks. Although progress has been made in mapping the components and deciphering the function of these networks, the mechanisms by which such intricate circuits originate and evolve remain poorly understood. Here I revisit and expand earlier models proposing that genomic repe...

Engineering design challenges and tinkering activities are increasingly popular in informal learning settings. Thus, these environments can benefit from foundational research on learners’ engineering processes as they engage in these settings. This paper conducts an exploitive analysis of an existing design challenges program at a science center through the investigation of the design processes...

By engaging in construction-based robotics activities, children as young as four can play to learn a range of concepts. The TangibleK Robotics Program paired developmentally appropriate computer programming and robotics tools with a constructionist curriculum designed to engage kindergarten children in learning computational thinking, robotics, programming, and problem-solving. This paper docum...

Our proposal for Social Practice Design (SPD), i.e., the design of social practices – in itself a social design activity -, seeks to ensure that the potential benefits of envisioned novel technologies can be realized, by increasing the bias towards the social in Information Systems Development (ISD). SPD is a form of intervention research or action research based on counselling. It can be consi...

Technology transfer has become recognised as a key factor in people’s efforts to implement information technology in diverse spheres of modern life, and particularly at the workplace. However, ‘transfer’ is a unidirectional conceptualisation of the processes of technology design and implementation. It veils the work of interpretation, mediation, and reshaping involved in the processes of ‘techn...