Informatics in Education

This case study aims at ensuring preservice science teachers to acquire experience by creating paper-based mind maps (PB-MM) and digital mind maps (D-MM) in technology education and to reveal their opinions on these mind mapping techniques. A total of 32 preservice science teachers, enrolled in the undergraduate program of Science Teaching at a university in Turkey, participated in this study. During the first three weeks of the six-week study, participants created PB-MM for certain subjects in science education. For the rest of the weeks, they created D-MM by using Coggle. As data collection tool, a form, consisting of open-ended questions, was used in this study. The obtained results demonstrated that the participants generally reported positive opinions including that mind maps are beneficial and useful tools in reinforcing, assessing and visualizing learning in general, making lessons more entertaining as well as offering ease of use. It was also concluded that students can also use mind maps in teaching of other topics such as “Vitamins”, “The Earth and the Universe” and “Systems” in particular, as well as in events like meetings, presentations, brainstorming. Advantages of D-MM were listed as the possibility of adding multimedia material, ease of correction processes and the visual richness, while its disadvantage was listed as experiencing technical problems. PB-MM contribute to psychomotor development of students as well as learning by performing/experiencing. The difficulty in processes such as deleting, editing, etc. and in adding videos and images constitute the restrictions of PB-MM technique.

The use of computers as teaching and learning tools plays a particularly important role in modern society. Within this scenario, Brazil launched its own version of the 'One Laptop per Child' (OLPC) program, and this initiative, termed PROUCA, has already distributed hundreds of low-cost laptops for educational purposes in many Brazilian schools. However in spite of the numerous studies conducted in the country since PROUCA was launched, Brazil shows a lack of proficiency in basic information crucial for managing and improving any OLPC initiative (e.g., number of effectively used laptops, use time and distribution per subject, use location and school performance of users, and others). Therefore, the focus of this article is to introduce MEMORE, a computational environment for longitudinal on-line data collection, integration and an analysis of how PROUCA laptops are used by schools. Technical details about MEMORE's architecture, database and functional models are supplied and the results from real data collected from Brazilian public schools are presented and analyzed. They elucidate how MEMORE can be a valuable management tool in OLPC contexts.

The aim of this work is to adapt and test, in a Brazilian public school, the ACE model proposed by Borkulo for evaluating student performance as a teaching-learning process based on computational modeling systems. The ACE model is based on different types of reasoning involving three dimensions. In addition to adapting the model and introducing innovative methodological procedures and instruments for collecting and analyzing data, our main results showed that the ACE model is superior than written tests for discriminating students on the top and bottom of the scale of scientific reasoning abilities, while both instruments are equivalent for evaluating students in the middle of the scale.

In this paper we present a small-scale study investigating the use of the MicroWorlds Pro multimedia programming environment as an authoring tool for constructing models, simulations and multimedia applications with students of Senior High School. We implemented the cross-thematic educational scenario ``Free fall simulation development'' as an open and flexible framework for activities in actual classroom circumstances, exploring two alternate instructional strategies: a) simulation development from scratch and b) use of a preconstructed microworld, and we observed how the students collaborate and interact with the programming environment. The findings highlight the overall process and the differences in the students' levels of engagement and performance, indicating some special features of the programming environment that contribute to or cause difficulty in the creation of an effective learning environment. We attempt to contribute to the discussion on the main parameters of designing, developing and implementing an effective constructionist approach aimed at engaging students in simulation development as a cross-thematic multimedia project.