This paper presents and analyses a set of data that reveal secondary education students' stance on the educational activities that were realised during a UMI (ubiquitous, mobile computing and the Internet of Things) Summer School. This Summer School deals with an IoT based recycling management application development and is part of UMI-Sci-Ed project that provides a training framework on UMI learning, for students aged between 14-16, with the use of properly designed educational scenarios and communities of practice (CoP) by setting UMI technologies as learning means and learning outcomes, simultaneously. The analysis focuses on the students' satisfaction and engagement (observed through a set of questionnaires) in relation with students' potential to follow the activities, the perceived, by the students, easiness, enjoyment and usefulness while setting as parameters the student gender and age. The results clearly show high student acceptability and engagement with the designed IoT-driven activities and reveal certain differentiations with respect to gender and age in these aspects. These findings, together with the observations that high student satisfaction does not translate to equally high engagement and that enjoyment is a critical factor, provide a basis for future adjustment of the educational scenarios and activities scope and design in order to enhance the UMI-Sci-Ed impact on student preference for a future career in the UMI technologies domain.
This work studies the influence of IoT-driven educational activities and tools (software, hardware and educational material) in STEM education as well as their role as STEM related career enablers to young boys and girls. The study builds on previous related results and applies to over 60 young students that are involved in hands-on learning activities in the context of a summer school. The analysis is based on especially designed close-ended and open-ended questionnaires as well as in-class observations and focuses on age and gender aspects. The results confirm the overall positive stance of the students on the educational activities and show that the provided tools under consideration are well accepted and effectively used. Furthermore, students' choices regarding prospective future careers reveal that their views on STEM fields and related professions have significantly been enriched through their participation in the summer school.
Educational web sites can be used as supporting learning tools for students that wish to supplement their knowledge without restrictions of time and place. The objective of this work is to propose a methodology for improving the mobile learners' web experience and provide personalized presentation of educational content. The proposed approach results in recommending relevant links to the users' interests, by exploiting the logs of the educational portal and the semantics of the learning content.
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