Surrounded by Science

Surrounded by Science: Learning paths towards science proficiency

The Surrounded by Science project brings together experts in science education research, science centres and museum educators, providers of outreach and informal learning activities, strong user communities and policymakers in Europe to design and develop a systematic assessment methodology that will analyse the impact of out-of-school science activities. By conducting field studies and other innovative data collection methods, the project will assess the impact of specific out-of-school activities. The project will draw from a digital toolbox of innovative research instruments to collect data from citizens actively participating in science-related activities.

The Surrounded by Science project is coordinated by the University of Twente in the Netherlands and partnered by seven organisations from Greece, France, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Israel and Norway.

The Surrounded by Science project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under Grant Agreement no. 101006349. This Website reflects only reflects the author’s view and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

DiCoTe

Increasing professional Digital Competence in ECTE with focus on enriching and supporting children’s play with coding toys

DiCoTe meets the urgent need to enhance professional digital competence in Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE). Digital professional competence in ECTE and in ECECs has been highly prioritised by the Government during the last decade. Despite these efforts, it has been reported that teachers in Norwegian ECECs do not have the professional digital competence that is required for adequately supporting children’s play with technology. DiCoTe aims to increase Norwegian ECTE teachers’ and ECTE students’ professional digital competence by developing resources for ECTE and implementing these resources in Norwegian ECTE. These resources will focus on enriching and supporting children’s play with technology in ECEC. These will be centred around play with coding toys that children aged 3-5 years, in cooperation, can programme by giving logical messages to a robot intuitively via direct interaction with the toy, without the use of screens. The resources will be developed in partnership among ECTE teachers, ECTE students, ECEC teachers, ECEC owners and researchers.

Partners in the DiCoTe project are: University of Stavanger (UiS), Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Western Norway University of Applied Science, Aalborg University (Denmark), Queen Maud University College, Sandnes Municipality, Røros Municipality, Melhus Municipality, The Science Factory in Sandnes, Didactic Digital Workshop at UiS and The Norwegian Centre for Mathematics Education in Trondheim.

The DiCoTe project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway.

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COMnPLAY-Science

Learning science the fun and creative way: coding, making, and play as vehicles for informal science learning in the 21st century (COMnPLAY-Science).

The COMnPLAY SCIENCE project aims to help Europe better understand the new ways in which non-formal and informal science learning is taking place through various coding, making, and play activities that young Europeans (children, adolescents and young adults) are nowadays increasingly engaged with, outside school and higher education science classrooms, beyond the formal boundaries of science education.

Coordinated by LCI NTNU, Norway and with partners from 10 European countries (Austria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, UK)

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Xdesign

Cross-Analytics Driven Design to Enhance Learning Experience

The challenge and vision of this seed-project is to provide rich and integrated knowledge on how to combine action-based (e.g., clickstreams) and physiological data-streams (e.g., brain activity), thus creating “cross-analytics”, to design meaingfull learning experiences. Xdesign is methodologically rooted in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and learning technologies. Xdesign’s research methods combine empirical, analytical, theoretical, and design approaches, all with focus on the relationship between user-generated data and their design capabilities to amplify human needs and capacities.

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Learn2Analyze

An Academia-Industry Knowledge Alliance for enhancing Online Training Professionals’ Competences in Educational Data Analytics (Learn2Analyze).

The goals of the Learn2Analyze project is to:

• Enhance existing competence frameworks for instructional designers and e-trainers of online courses with new Educational Data Literacy competences for using emerging Educational Data Analytics methods and tools.
• Develop and evaluate a series of professional development Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for cultivating these competences with emphasis to combining theory and practice in the form of authentic work-oriented tasks.

The Learn2Analyze consortium is an international Knowledge Alliance of six organisations from five different European Union countries (Greece, Norway, Germany, Italy and Ireland) and one partner from Australia and three global eLearning market leaders of online course management systems with educational data analytics capacities (including Moodle, IMC’s Learning Suite and eXact Learning).

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Future Learning

Orchestrating 21st Century Learning Ecosystems using Analytics

Learning analytics allow instructors and researchers to discover important learning episodes and phenomena (e.g., moment of learning/misconception), get better understanding of learner characteristics/needs; and understand the features that make the learning material effective. In Future Learning we will leverage learning analytics capabilities to formulate a conceptual framework for assisting researchers and instructors in improving the orchestration of e-learning tools and practices as well as harmonizing heterogeneous learning analytics streams. The aim of the project is to investigate how the insights of learning analytics can inform us to better orchestrate different e-learning tools and learning practices. In particular, we want to explore:

• What kind of learning analytics can help orchestrate a learning ecosystem?
• How can different learning analytics be integrated to improve educators’ decisions?
• How do integrated learning analytics contribute to the creation of more meaningful and efficient set of technologies for learning?
• How can different technologies be coupled to help students overcome the difficulties they face while keeping them engaged?

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Adapt-IT

Adaptive Learning Analytics to Support Information Technology Education (Adapt-IT).

Adaptive learning can foster the creation of meaningful learning experiences, since “one-size-does-not-fit-all” and research has shown that the students’ learning experience and performance can be improved through adaptive e-learning environments that suit their needs. Adaptive learning environments can automatically build a visual presentation of students’ learning progress and provide different learning analytics reports. AdaptIT will support various programming languages courses, like Java and JavaScript; covering various IT courses. The goal of the project is to visualize the state of individual student’s knowledge and present the visualization to students, instructors and academic advisors. This helps students in facilitating their metacognitive activities and promoting self-reflection and awareness.

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Cognition 2.0

Cognition 2.0: Physiological and Contextual Computing for Augmenting Human Cognition

The purpose of Cognition 2.0 is twofold: (a) to bridge the cognitive gap by building and deploying a “cognitive information layer” in-between human and machine, responsible for informing the machine side about user’s cognitive states and adapting ongoing human-machine interaction, respectively; and (b) to serve as an application framework, encompassing design and development guidelines for future cognition-aware applications. For realizing these objectives, Cognition 2.0 will draw on an interdisciplinary approach that combines state-of-the-art knowledge and methods from the fields of Contextual and Physiological Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Neuroscience, and Cognitive Psychology.

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Excited

Centre for Excellent IT Education (Excited) is one of the eight national Centers for Excellent Education (SFU) in Norway, granted and funded from the National Agency for Quality in Education (NOKUT). Excited focuces in innovative technologies and practices in order to support CS education.

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