Technologies

With MaLT2, students create and share animated 3D figural models with text-based programming and dynamic manipulation. The models can vary from simple cubes to complex DNA models, jewels and fractal trees and anything one can imagine.

Ideas and concepts from mathematics, engineering, art and computer science are seamlessly combined in a creative and collaborative process of experimentation, tinkering and self-expression.

With ChoiCo students can become sensitive to and grapple with wicked problems by playing, modifying, or creating choice-driven simulation games. Wicked problems are multi-faceted real life contentious problems with no clear solution.

As players, students employ decision making, empathy, argumentation, and systems thinking to make choices with conflicting consequences and try to maintain balance for as long as possible. The winner is the player who survives longer.

As designers, they can design a map and places choices on it, define conflicting consequences and game rules, by using block-based programming, map-editing and database affordances. By switching between the roles of player and designer, they become more knowledgeable and less anxious about important socio-scientific issues of our time, such as climate change, balanced diet, etc. They also develop skills such as computational thinking, creativity, communication, flexibility, and critical thinking.

With SorBET students can design, modify, share and play Tetris-like classification games.

Gameplay is about quick decision-making for pushing the falling objects to the categories they belong to. To do that players need to identify the characteristics of each object and match them with those of the categories.

SorBET allows the design and modification of the game elements such as density, speed, rules, object and category definitions, with block-based programming and database affordances.

The field of objects and categories is up to the student to define, with no restriction to the topic. Through that process, students develop 21st-century skills such as classification skills, critical thinking, computational thinking.

 nQuire for students is developed for use by schools, teachers, and students. Within a password-protected environment, students and teachers will be able to design, manage, pilot and improve their own studies, while they will be able to collect data by peer students that can inform a design thinking project.

Teachers will be able to review studies created by students and provide feedback as to how these could be improved. nQuire for students will help learners develop basic research skills related to the design of a research study.

GearsBot is a tool that supports a 3D robotics simulator using either drag-and-drop blocks of code or Python. 

An example of DT project using GearsBot can be that the pupil can use one of the  virtual “worlds” and make it fit in an imaginary scenario of a problem that they may think about, or to choose a more advanced “world” like the “fire rescue” and try to improve how the robot is constructed and controlled to complete a rescue mission.

The Learning Analytics Dashboard provides an interactive web tool for visualizing data collected through learning analytics. It processes event-based user interactions with learning tools such as Choico, Sorbet, Malt2, and GearsBot, and presents the predefined dashboard and configurable dashboard where teachers can authorise the assessment of the learners achievements such us students understanding, motivation,experimentaiton with technology, creativity, and interaction with the learning tools.