While references to the concept of “learning community” abound in the literature, a common ingredient is the belief that learning is enhanced when there is a commitment to sharing ideas and knowledge within a collaborative group or network of individuals. To support student teachers completing their practicum placements as part of a one-year Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education at the Austra...

During the past two years, a team of researchers, developers and teachers at Boulder Language Technologies has been collaborating with colleagues at the University of Colorado and the University of Pittsburgh to develop My Science Tutor (MyST), an intelligent tutoring system that is designed to improve science achievement of third, fourth and fifth grade students through conversational spoken d...

Team projects play an important role in the education of engineers. This paper describes a team project module that is part of a postgraduate course in informatics. Its main objective is to give students a hands-on experience with different aspects of working in a team on a problem. We discuss several issues that should be considered in designing such module as a part of a curriculum: team form...

Team formation is a critical step in deploying a multi-agent team. In some scenarios, agents coordinate by voting continuously. When forming such teams, should we focus on the diversity of the team or on the strength of each member? Can a team of diverse (and weak) agents outperform a uniform team of strong agents? In this demo, the user will be able to explore these questions by playing one of...

It is impossible to imagine everyday life without embedded devices and robotic applications, as they are utilized in almost every nowadays technical product. And there is a frantic need of well-educated developers, designers and programmers to handle and further evolve this existing technology. The domain itself is in a big change because the borders of pure ICT and embedded system are fusing a...

Courses on algorithm analysis often include little programming, and do not emphasize application of advanced techniques to practical problems. On the other hand, students usually prefer hands-on learning, and may lack motivation to study theory. We augmented an algorithms course with a series of programming tasks, which involved application of the course material to image processing. These task...

The presentation and usability of security features can represent a significant impediment to effective protection for end-user systems. In order to investigate the nature and level of problems that can be encountered during attempts to use security within standard end-user applications, this paper presents results from a series of hands-on user trials from web browsing, wordprocessing, and ema...

Elementary school students often find science a complex subject to learn (Johnstone, 1991; Millar, 1991). Robotics have been used in previous studies to promote science learning as they provide students an environment to observe abstract concepts through the use of tangible, hands-on objects (Nagchaudhuri et al., 2002; Barker & Ansorge, 2007; Druin & Hendler, 2000). However, few studies have in...

This paper describes the concept and implementation of a collaborative learning platform for school education over the Internet. The authors called this platform the "eTrip System," because they applied it to a school field study. Using information technologies, it supports the whole learning flow for a field trip: pre-trip learning; hands-on learning; and post-trip learning. It enables student...

Problem based learning (PBL) has gained widespread approval as a student centered and student activating approach to teaching and learning. At Aalborg University this approach has been applied since the foundation of the university in 1974 and the so called Aalborg model has to some extent been developed through ‘learning by doing’. In recognition of the long experience with PBL the university ...