This article focuses on the challenging topic of indoor location and guidance in daily tasks of location and hostile scenarios (i.e. emergency evacuations) that could be produced, which at present have no universally viable and implemented solution. Indoor guidance in public spaces such as hospitals or private spaces such as a company building helps people with mild and moderate cognitive disabilities to get on safely in their daily lives and to promote their social integration. This paper analyses three areas of research: location technologies, location services for sensory navigation and problems derived from stress due to panic in hostile circumstances. Therefore, in this work we focus on finding solutions related to the absence of GNSS signals, discriminating of different floors in a building, problems of adequate information transmission to the users and absence of connectivity and interfaces, i.e. we must adapt the solutions that exist for outdoor to indoor. In particular, the analysis has focused on viable technologies for emergency or everyday situations that create a network of roads within a single building. The results obtained outline the requirements that need to be addressed in the development of wayfinding services that provides sensory guidance to people with cognitive disabilities.

Citizen science involves volunteers who participate in scientific research by collecting data or by addressing the needs of the project they are involved in. Citizen science creates a nexus between science and education that, when coupled with emerging technologies, expands the frontiers of research. Social networks, such as Twitter, are increasingly being investigated to capture online interactive participation, to be said, the degree of engagement of citizen science researchers with their projects. Although citizen science projects have been remarkably successful in advancing scientific knowledge, there is not really any evidence supporting that social networks act as learning tools and it is not even known whether the educational aspect is taken into account in citizen science projects. In this paper, we present a preliminary Twitter study where we analyse the conversation around education in the citizen science area. Although the results show that there is some talk around educational aspects, Twitter is not mainly used to support educational activities overall.

Computational Thinking (CT) is a fundamental skill that is not only confined to computer scientists’ activities but can be widely applied in daily life and is required in order to adapt to the future and, therefore, should be taught at early ages. Within this framework, assessing CT is an indispensable part to consider in order to introduce CT in the school curricula. Nevertheless, efforts involving the formal assessment of computational thinking has primarily focused on middle school grades and above; and are mostly based on the analysis of projects in specific programming environments. A Beginners Computational Thinking Test (BCTt), aimed at early ages, and based on the Computational Thinking Test [1], has been designed including several improvements; submitted to a content validation process through expert´s judgement procedure; and administered to Primary School students. The BCTt design is considered adequate by experts and results show a high reliability for the assessment of CT in Primary School, particularly in first educational stages.

This article describes the design, development, and evaluation of an application to help people with autism spectrum condition (ASC) express themselves through the creation of stories and comics. The intended platform of the application is touchscreen devices. The design process follows a human-centered design approach involving caregivers, teachers, usability experts, primary school students, and people with ASC. The characteristics considered are explained to design and implement the application, as well as the different evaluation steps. The prototype design was evaluated with 36 experts (teachers, caregivers, and usability experts). Next, 14 primary school students and 10 participants from a special education institution tested the application. Among all the participants, five students of the primary school institution have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and five students of the special education institution had ASC. The feedback gathered shows the importance of multidisciplinary teams in developing an application aimed at people with special needs. Non-functional features such as usability and accessibility can be bypassed by developers and this is the point at which teachers, caregivers, usability experts, and even the end users of the application can provide their insights in order to improve the product during its development phase. This also reduces the costs that would be incurred if the final product had to be changed after its development.

Few teachers include information and communication technology in the classroom, despite their potential for increasing attention and motivation for students. Educational authoring tools are intended to turn teachers into designers and deliverers of technology-enhanced educational content, and increasing the adoption of these tools is a key element for speeding up this transformation. This paper emphasizes the importance of learnability for preventing rejection or abandonment by of such an authoring tool, and how acceptance is deeply affected by the interaction paradigm and the creation metaphor used in the tool. We present an analysis comparing two design paradigms: the widespread menu-based and choice-guided interaction paradigm versus a consistent metaphor with direct manipulation. The latter was implemented in DEDOS-Editor, a novel authoring tool that allows the creation of diverse educational activities that can be performed on different devices, such as PCs, digital blackboards, tablets, and multitouch surfaces. An experimental study shows the tremendous impact that interface choices have on the tool's learning curve. The results provide the first mapping of the choice of a direct-manipulation interface and its effect on the learning curve's entry point, as well as a consistent interaction metaphor with smoother and fast-growing learning curves. This allows users to complete more tasks and gain more knowledge through experience, in contrast to menu-based interfaces. The initial use of the tool is thus made easier for users with no experience or information about the tool, and the advantages of experience and expertize in facing new challenges are facilitating. This work also highlights the appropriateness of learning curves as a tool for measuring learnability.

We live immersed in a technological world. Learning is not an exception; most classrooms are equipped with multiple devices intended to improve the learning process for students. Especially for novice teachers, there is a need to provide usable technological tools that help them with their counterpart teaching tasks. This paper presents a set of teacher authoring tools to facilitate the tasks of identifying learning tricky topics , noting student difficulties, and creating quizzes for knowledge evaluation. The resulting quizzes, generated by these tools, are used at the start of learning activities, where students explain tricky topics by creating educational videos that use juxtaposition, and which are then shared and commented among peers.

Video-based learning is a widely used approach for teaching. This paper investigates how this approach could be improved with other well known methodology: computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). The integration of both approaches results in a creative and engaging educational activity, collaborative film-making. This task is supported by a platform developed as a social network During the design of the platform, opinions of teachers and students were taken into account. Both, teachers and students, agreed that this approach helps students to understand threshold concepts. In addition, students identified useful facilities in the platform like group-private workspaces or commenting tools. Students' satisfaction was high, in fact they recommend the use of this approach in more subjects.

Learning technologies offer new opportunities to people with disabilities to develop their autonomy and independence. This paper shows how multitouch tabletops support collaborative learning activities for people with cognitive disabilities and people with ASD. We report two educational experiences that have been set up in different contexts. The first one involved 52 students with cognitive disabilities learning musical instruments collaboratively. In the second one, 8 students with ASD worked in pairs focusing on activities related to theory of mind and daily life situations. The main finding is that the students' awareness of other students' actions is increased when they were performing the activities by turns in both experiences. This gives another perspective on the use of these devices as learning tools which have been mainly devised for simultaneous interactions.

This courseware contribution describes the work done based on a social networking platform for educational purposes. The main task of the students will be creating videos related to concepts of inheritance. One of the main roles of the platform is to facilitate communication and discussion among students during the video creation process. Students thought that private discussion forums and video rating were the most useful tools. In addition students are satisfied with the learning experience.

A variety of computing technologies, in addition to the personal computer, are now commonly used in many settings. As networking infrastructures mature, it is increasingly feasible and affordable to consider closer integration and use of these heterogeneous devices in tandem. However, little is known about how best to design or evaluate such ‘device ecologies’; in particular, how best to combine devices to achieve a desired type of collaborative user experience. A central concern is how users switch their attention between devices, to utilize the various elements to best effect. We describe here the development of an ecology of devices for groups of students to use when engaged in collaborative inquiry-learning activities. This included a multi-touch tabletop, laptops, projections, video streams and telephone. In situ studies of students and tutors using it in three different settings showed how individuals and groups switched their foci between the multiple devices. We present our findings, using a novel method for analysing users’ transitions between foci, identifying patterns and emergent characteristics. We then discuss the importance of designing for transitions that enable groups to appropriately utilise an ecology of devices, using the concepts of seams, bridges, niches and focal character.

In the last years the development of learning environments, and particularly of Educational Adaptive Hypermedia (EAH) systems has increased significantly. However, it is important to complement this development with evaluation methods in order to improve EAH system performance. In this context, we propose to analyze the data from student interaction with EAH systems utilizing the GeSES method. This method has been specifically designed to work with student logs and is based on C4.5 rules. In particular, the work described in this paper aims to achieve the following two objectives: testing the method with different types of data in order to find out its reliability, and detecting symptoms of low performance in a specific adaptive learning environment, called CoMoLE.

In this paper, the architecture of a system that supports context-based adaptation for m-learning is presented. This system manages data about users and activities so that the most suitable activities to be accomplished at each time are proposed to each user. This decision is not only based on the user’s personal features, preferences or previous actions but also on information about the specific user’s context, including spare time, location and available devices.