This research paper explores the integration of Inclusive and STEAM Education within K-6 settings, highlighting the scarcity of evidence on adapting educational practices to accommodate this fusion. To address the demand for skilled professionals in STEM fields, particularly computer science, and engineering, it proposes four new occupational profiles for educators in Inclusive STEAM environments: Inclusive STEAM primary school teacher, STEAM special educational needs primary school teacher, Inclusive STEAM learning support teacher, and Inclusive STEAM pedagogy expert. The paper introduces these occupational profiles by utilizing qualitative research methods and involving teachers and teachers' associations from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Spain. It, also, aligns these profiles with competences drawn from the Inclusive STEAM Educator's Competence Framework, adhering to ESCO guidelines for the internationalization of jobs. The paper underscores the importance of tailored educational roles and competences in fostering inclusivity in STEAM education, contributing to a more equitable access to STEM careers.

In the digital age, the need for digital proficiency has expanded beyond conventional job roles, marking a new era where fundamental digital literacy and higher-level competences, particularly in Artificial Intelligence (AI), are indispensable in various sectors, especially within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. This evolution necessitates enhancing digital competence training and ongoing professional development for adult educators to effectively navigate and impart knowledge in this rapidly evolving digital realm. In response to this need, we introduce a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) specifically designed for adult educators and education providers, focusing on developing and delivering educational programs using the DigComp framework, which outlines essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes for digital competence across five key areas. This paper presents the MOOC's development, structure, and preliminary assessment. The curriculum spans seven modules, covering the nuances of the DigComp framework, its application in educational strategies, and skill recognition. The evaluation, combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, reveals the program's impact and areas for improvement. This study underscores the crucial role of digital literacy in modern education and professional development, offering insights for advancing adult digital skills education.

This work researched the educators’ views regarding the challenges, the difficulties and the professional development needs of STEM educators. Drawing on an online survey, based on specially designed close-ended and open-ended questions, we analyzed the educators’ views in order to understand critical factors and to provide more insight regarding the successful preparation of STEM educators. In this study, 59 educators, who have been involved in the implementation of STEM educational programs in Greece, were participated. Results showed that educators face several challenges and difficulties, while the misunderstandings of parents about STEM education also affect educators’ work. In addition, although professional development on different topics was considered necessary depending on educators’ needs and academic background, technical training was a common need for the participants. Our findings suggest that redesign of the national curriculum and the implementation of targeted training programs based on specific needs are needed to better support the role of STEM educator.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are two terms closely related to the vision of embedding sensing, processing and communication capabilities into everyday objects and physical environments whose interaction can support effectively human activities. In this paper we propose the term AmIoT to refer to AmI applications composed by IoT devices available in an AmI environment to serve a specific goal of its owner/creator. AmIoT is characterized by the human-centric perspective of AmI, the capability for thing-to-thing interactions and the shaping of IoT rich environments by end-users. Leveraging on the microservices architectural style to overcome fundamental application development and deployment challenges, a microservices-based platform is developed to support the runtime operation of AmIoT applications. Furthermore, an editing tool is provided to empower end-users to configure such applications using the trigger-action programming paradigm. AmIoT characteristics have been explored in practice by developing prototype IoT devices to realize an example use case scenario. Experiences from a preliminary usability evaluation of the editing tool are also reported.

Currently, there is a growing research interest on emerging technologies, such as, ubiquitous computing, mobile computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), collectively mentioned as UMI technologies. The proliferation of UMI technologies will not only changethe way we live but can also offer new learning opportunities. At the same time, there is an increasing need for skills that are associated with the UMI domain in the labour market. The Umi-Sci-Ed is an EU project which explores ways to shed new light into this training aspect by introducing several model educational scenarios that incorporate UMI technologies, in order to cultivate relevant competences on high school students. This paper reports initial results achieved in this context. In particular, we give an overview of the key components of the UMI-Sci-Ed platform that aims to support the activities of Communities of Practice involved in STEM education. Students through a mentoring mechanism are provided with training material, IoT hardware kits and software tools to explore UMI technologies through hands-on activities. In this framework, example educational scenarios and the corresponding UMI applications developed are presented. The hypothesis is that the learning process can be empowered by using such UMI applications as students are provided with meaningful opportunities to participate in the learning process such as in terms of building applications that are relevant to the subject they like and having active interactions within student groups in a way that practical experiences can provide them a rich context to grasp scientific knowledge. Finally, the results of a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach in the context of an educational workshop are discussed.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became very popular during the last years leading to an increasing global debate about their quality. To address the quality issues, several research surveys and instruments were developed to analyse the current status of MOOCs and to examine the different perspectives of learning with MOOC from core MOOC stakeholders. Based on a literature review and analysis of existing quality approaches and indicators for MOOCs, the Global MOOC Quality Survey was designed and conducted (n=267). Final objective is the development of the Quality Reference Framework (QRF) with quality indicators and tools in close collaboration with all interested stakeholders worldwide. This paper presents first results from the Global MOOC Quality survey relating to the overall experiences with MOOCs and their offered four interaction types: learner-facilitator (LF), learner-resource (LR), learner-learner (LL) and group-group (GG). There was a very high significant relationship (p<.001) between the learners' MOOC experience and the three interaction types LF, LR and LL and a significant relationship (p=.026) for the fourth interaction type GG. There was not a significant relationship between the designers' MOOC experience and all four interaction types. Comparing the different perspectives of learners and designers, our analysis presents significant differences in MOOC learners' and designers' intentions and experiences. Hence, it can be questioned whether MOOC designers are currently understanding and meeting the interests and demands of the MOOC learners.

This work targets to the technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), regarding to security and trusted devices. It provides to the readers a comprehensive understanding of both security and privacy aspects. Modern systems and networks are quoted, in order to cover any questions arising from the theoretical approach. Hardware integration devices are also presented, for flexible implementations for the presented IoT technologies. Emphasis is given to IoT embedded hardware platforms like Udoo, which fully support IoT implementations. Last but not least, data and information preservation are analyzed, so as not to get lost or misused.

Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing technologies, as well as the Internet of Things, affect the way we live and learn. Ongoing research efforts aim at providing an educational framework that would exploit these technologies in order to support and enhance STEM education. The foundations for the development of the framework are laid by a comparison of secondary Computer Science education curricula in Greece, Cyprus and England. The methodology and results of this research are described and discussed in this paper and the next steps of the research are specified.

The ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) is considered as an extension of the computational capabilities of the physical environment, allowing the computational structure to be present everywhere in the form of small, robust, networked processing devices distributed at all scales through everyday life and generally turned to distinctly common place ends. There are various research challenges regarding the design and use of instructional design tools in complex learning contexts such as Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile learning (m-learning) and Internet of Things (IoT), the technologies defined as UMI technologies. This paper presents the rationale, important issues and methodology constructed in the context of UbiComp so as to initially define an instructional design process for building a U - Learning Ecology for multidisciplinary education. We provide a consistent framework and structural view of integrating instructional design principles in UbiComp learning: we discuss our ideas on the design of a U-learning ecology by the gradual building of a robust design process and we provide an overview of our ongoing work on design/analysis tools supporting early stage prototyping for using UMI technologies.

The special track “Motivating students with Mobiles, Ubiquitous applications and the Internet of Things for STEM (MUMI4STEM)”, within the “EDUCON20I7 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference”, integrates two main areas of interest in STEM education: I) motivating students with mobile devices and 2) exploiting ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. Following the growing interest of the educational and research community towards fostering STEM education, this special session aims at promoting the discussion about the motivational aspects of mobile learning and the benefits of ubiquitous applications and the Internet of Things (IoT), with special focus on supporting STEM education.

The societies and their economies, working and living conditions are changing all over the world. That includes the educational systems that are challenged by moving objectives and development targets [6] [10]. Competing businesses and interests at national, regional and international scales are demanding for citizens to acquire and develop much different skills and competences, also new kinds of literacy, and many educational public authorities are understanding this shift and following this request [7]. Personality and competence building in public education should prepare for new economies and jobs that are emerging but not yet fully developed.

The improvement in quality of services offered by educational institutions is one of the main challenges of the modern education informatics. The personalization of educational process requires adaptive learning schemes since the student status and conditions inside an institution constantly change. In this paper, we present the EDUC8 (EDUCATE) system, which aims at providing a new approach concerning real-time personalization and adaptation of learning business processes. The EDUC8 system consists of a learning process execution engine supported by a semantic framework, which is based on an ontology enclosing the knowledge and the information and provides decisions and recommendations for the next steps of the learning process. Furthermore, the results of the rule-set execution may produce new objects that will be inserted in the ontology as new knowledge.

Pedagogy has emphasized that physical representations and tangible interactive objects benefit learning especially for young students. There are many tangible hardware platforms for introducing computer programming to children, but there is limited comparative evaluation of them in the context of a formal classroom. In this work, we explore the benefits of learning to code for tangible computers, such as robots and wearable computers, in comparison to programming for the desktop computer. For this purpose, 36 students participated in a within-groups study that involved three types of target computer platform tangibility: (1) desktop, (2) wearable, and (3) robotic. We employed similar blocks-based visual programming environments, and we measured emotional engagement, attitudes, and computer programming performance. We found that students were more engaged by and had a higher intention of learning programming with the robotic rather than the desktop computer. Furthermore, tangible computing platforms, either robot or wearable, did not affect the students’ performance in learning basic computational concepts (e.g., sequence, repeat, and decision). Our findings suggest that computer programming should be introduced through multiple target platforms (e.g., robots, smartphones, wearables) to engage children.

Guest Editorial.

In this paper we report on our current research and development work that aims to apply pervasive computing and context-aware technologies to enhance the teaching and learning experience in distance education environments. In order to achieve this goal we move from the 2-D user interfaces found in virtual class management systems to the ubiquitous 3-D environment of the classroom. A smart classroom prototype is presented which provides the necessary mechanisms for building context-aware services to enrich distance learning experience. The fusion of location tracking with activity recognition mechanisms allows to control the liveliness of the video stream transmitted to remote students in order to reduce the gap between physical and virtual classrooms.

Biomedical engineering is the application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends in the medicine and biology fields. It comprises many research directions including computational model of HIV infection, integration of clinical and experimental data, etc. Much of the work in biomedical engineering consists in providing solutions to the problem of securing an effective integration of biomedical content. To this end, ontologies, as sharable, reusable and machine-readable artifacts capable of knowledge representation, contribute to the interoperability between systems, the access of heterogeneous information sources, and the reuse of voluminous and complex information. The aim of this paper is to present the literature on biomedical ontologies in order to highlight how current research of the ontology field can be brought to bear on the practical problems associated with biomedical engineering. Thus, we discuss the fundamental role of ontologies in biomedical engineering, we review several methodologies suitable for building specialized biomedical ontologies, and we present some peculiarities related to the creation of biomedical ontologies that continue to constitute research challenges.

Learning outcomes are statements that should accompany any type of educational material intended for lifelong learning. These statements deliver important information, which works as an indicator for students in the process of learning. However, in order for this information to be further utilizable within the context of intelligent e-learning applications, a more fine-grained definition and structure should be adopted. Having these in mind, we initially assign a strict and rather technical definition for the notion of learning outcomes, which is fully aligned, though, with their educational purpose. We then propose an ontological model for their representation and classification, which fully adheres to this definition. Our ultimate goal is to provide the mean for exploiting all aspects of knowledge implied by such statements within intelligent applications. To bear out this possibility, we apply our model to a selected piece of educational material provided by the Hellenic Open University.

Social Networking Services (SNS) provide users with functionalities for developing their on line social networks, connecting with other users, sharing and consuming content. While most of popular SNS provide open Web 2.0 APIs, they remain disconnected from each other thus fragmenting user's data, social network and content. Semantic social web technologies such as public vocabularies and ontologies can be used for bridging the semantic gap between different SNS. Ontology-based representations of SNS APIs can help developers share knowledge about SNS APIs and can be used for linking APIs with public Social Semantic Web ontologies and vocabularies and for enabling automatic ontology-based service composition. An ontology based representation has been proposed for representing the API of the popular SNS Google+. In this paper, we study the API of Twitter SNS and create an ontology based representation of its structural and functional properties. The proposed Twitter REST API ontology reuses classes of the existing Google+ API ontology and describes valuable structural and functional details of the API, in a machine process able format useful for understanding the API and appropriate for integrating into ontology based Mashups.

Educational process' experimental implementation with the support of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) integrated to the elective course "Principles of Environmental Sciences" of the Second High School Class that combines environmental education, principles of space design, introduction to information technologies in ecology and "green" ICT, and sustainable development through the digital management of planting and of the introduction to the crucial wider issue of precision agriculture. The experimental implementation is realized in collaboration with the professors of the 1st General High School of Agios Dimitrios. Temperature sensors, humidity and illumination are placed in structures parametrically designed according to the bioclimatic conditions of the space of the school yard and have been sited in accordance with the operational needs of the complex. Students interact with plants and offer maintenance services when plants request it.

One of the principal objectives of today's ambient intelligence environments is to provide users with services according to their activity, i.e. preferences in order to accomplisha specific user goal. For this purpose, miscellaneous user information must be collected and structured into user profiles. These profiles offer the advantage of being easily enriched and exploitable by the environment, in order to deliver to the user, at any moment and at any place, the best fitted service, with regard to his activity. In this paper we present an ontology-based user profile model which provides the static data about a user but also the context of the user in a given situation in real time.

Workflows have been used to model repeatable tasks or operations in a number of different industries including manufacturing and software. In this paper we examine the use of workflows to model the interaction of services that can be found in intelligent environments to support user tasks and goals. The deployment of such workflows needs to take care special design considerations, including context awareness, adaptation management, device heterogeneity, and user empowerment. In this paper, we present a framework for the deployment of adaptive workflows. The deployment infrastructure supports BPEL-like, design-time compositions that are complemented by mechanisms for the selection and binding of services at runtime. Workflow behaviour can also adjust dynamically in response to detected changes and unforeseen events by a suit of agents whose initial relationships are specified in the workflows.

In this paper we describe the ATRACO (adaptive and trusted ambient ecologies) approach towards next generation ambient intelligent environments. Several agents, such as a fuzzy task agent with learning capabilities and an interaction agent collaborate in a goal-related activity sphere and adapt heterogeneous artifacts within the sphere in order to support the user to fulfill tasks. All components work on a dynamic sphere ontology, which forms the main knowledge base of the ecology. The presented prototype is able to realize the goal ¿feel comfortable at home after work¿ and was implemented in an existing intelligent environment.

Contemporary software technologies complying with the Service-Oriented Architectural (SOA) paradigm, such as OSGi, UPnP, and the Web services do not meet on their own the adaptability and interoperability challenges of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments. In this paper we present a solution based on the combination of the SOA model with Agents and Ontologies. The agent approach complements the SOA infrastructure by providing high level adaptation to user's tasks, as an intelligent control layer above SOA. Ontologies are used to tackle the semantic heterogeneity that arises in AmI spaces and provide to agents a common repository of system knowledge, policies and state.

This article describes our approach towards the specification and realization of interoperability within Next Generation Ambient Intelligent Environments (NGAIE). These are populated with numerous devices and multiple occupants or users exhibit increasingly intelligent behaviour, provide optimized resource usage and support consistent functionality and human-centric operation. In NGAIEs users will interact with their environments using the devices therein complemented with adaptive multimodal dialogue. This requires the definition of the local and global information which is relevant to the interaction and mechanisms to share this knowledge among entities. In our approach, knowledge is represented as a set of heterogeneous ontologies which have to be aligned in order to provide a uniform and consistent knowledge representation. The combination of heterogeneous ontologies and ontology matching algorithms allows for semantically rich information exchange. Based on a combination of agent-based and service-oriented architectures, the proposed approach adopts a task-based model to maximize the use of available heterogeneous resources.

An important characteristic of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) environments is the integration of information, communication and sensing technologies into our everyday objects, giving rise to a new proactive computing model in homes. A smart home uses networked sensors, devices and appliances to build an intelligent environment in which many activities in the home are automated and where devices and services seamlessly cooperate to support domestic tasks. Programming and maintaining such an infrastructure is challenging because suitable abstractions are currently missing. In this work we have attempted to define ambient ecologies as a metaphor for modeling UbiComp applications, specify design patterns and programming principles and develop infrastructure to provide a paradigm of application engineering and tools to support ambient ecology designers, developers and end-users. We describe our model and the middleware architecture and present the engineering of applications in a smart home environment.

In this paper, we will introduce a novel system where identical miniaturized robotic agents with limited capabilities will collaborate to form a team that is capable of localizing and repairing scale formations in tanks and pipes within inaccessible fluidic environments. Each robotic agent is an autonomous entity that is based on the biologically inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) that communicate using pulses or spikes. The weights of the SNN are evolved using adaptive genetic algorithm (GA) that uses adaptive crossover and mutation to converge relatively fast to solutions that allow the robots to complete the desired tasks. The robotic agents communicate using indirect communication to move towards the site of scale formation and collaborate to repair damages.

The paper describes research that has been carried out in "extrovert-Gadgets", a research project funded in the context of EU IST/FET proactive initiative "Disappearing Computer". It presents a set of architectures for the composition of ubiquitous computing applications. The proposed architectures are part of GAS (Gadgetware Architectural Style), a generic architectural style, which can be used to describe everyday environments populated with computational artifacts. The overall innovation of the GAS approach lies in viewing the process where people configure and use complex collections of interacting eGadgets, as having much in common with the process where system builders design software systems out of components. This approach regards the everyday environment as being populated with tens even hundreds of artifacts, which people (who are always in control) associate in ad-hoc and dynamic ways.

In the new paradigm of computer use, the computer ceases to exist as an integrated multi-task device, but disintegrates into a task-oriented collection of networked devices. These devices do not resemble computers yet they have computational abilities. None of these concepts will be realised without appropriate support from communication technologies-P2P networking being the primary candidate. This paper describes part of the research being conducted in the Extrovert Gadgets project geared towards applying P2P computing solutions to the context of networked everyday objects.