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.

Muscular strength tests are of fundamental importance for the physiotherapeutic diagnosis and a difficult issue for learning. Also, there are very few softwares specifically developed for teaching/learning and diagnosis in the Physical Therapy area. This work describes the development and evaluation of MuStreT, an educational multimedia computer tool for Physical Therapy students. MuStreT integrates hypertext, movie clips, narrations, animations, self-evaluation questionnaires, and was inspired by the constructivism concepts. The software was developed using Unified Modeling Language concepts and implemented using animation and authoring tools. MuStreT was quantitatively evaluated by Physical Therapy students and qualitatively evaluated by Physical Therapy professionals/lecturers and Computer Science students. Results show that learning was increased using MuStreT, thanks to its interactivity potential and multimedia features. This work suggests that the use of informatics in Physical Therapy education has a great potential for improving the teaching-learning process.