Synchronous hybrid learning allows physically distributed students and teachers to participate simultaneously in learning activities. Despite the growing interest in synchronous hybrid learning, there remains a need for further investigation into effective pedagogical approaches and technological implementations that support teacher-student interactions at the school level. Addressing this, we present a prototype of an in-house holographic telepresence environment for synchronous hybrid learning, demonstrated through an exploratory study connecting students and teachers across two continents. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the six participating teachers to understand their experiences and perceptions related to the application of holographic telepresence for synchronous hybrid learning. Thematic analysis of the interview data highlights the pedagogical challenges that teachers faced, identifies technological environment design improvements, and outlines new opportunities for enhancing synchronous hybrid learning experiences. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on leveraging immersive technologies to enhance education in diverse and geographically separated settings.

Although co-designing games has received ample attention from researchers, there is a research gap on intergenerational co-design of games with children and young people where children’s unconstrained ideas are the basis for game co-design. This is particularly important when co-designed games are aimed at children. We explored a co-design process of digital games involving 4-year-old children, high school students, and college students in Joensuu, Finland, during October–November 2020. Over the course of three co-design workshops, six kindergarteners (3 girls, 3 boys) played freely with building blocks while six high school students (3 females, 3 males) observed their play, asked questions to the children, and interpreted the data to design two digital games. These designs were further elaborated in co-design meetings between the high school students and college students (12 males, 1 female), latter of whom developed mobile games based on the designs. In the fourth workshop, the kindergarten children tested the games. We used qualitative content analysis on the data collected via interviews of the high school students and observations of the co-design process. The outcomes of the co-design process were the conceptualizations and game designs by the high school students based on the children’s play, and the implemented games by the college students. The participants’ intertwined creativity, thinking and content production were observable in the games. Based on the interview data analysis and our observations, we identified unique contributions and assets for each group. Furthermore, the high school students’ interviews revealed 28 success factors of the intergenerational co-design process. Based on these findings, we present a generalized representation of the intergenerational co-design process that can be used for planning intergenerational game co-design projects involving young children and older age groups.

This is work-in-progress research-to-practice. Computer-based solutions are viewed as key to many technological problems, especially in reducing the impact of technology on the environment. At the same time, these computing solutions have their negative impacts. Such negative impacts are not understood by many computing specialists, as computing graduates have not been made aware of these undesirable impacts of their solutions. Based on frameworks such as CC2020, most computing curricula in Southern Africa, do not incorporate sustainability concepts. This means computing graduates of these African institutions will continue to view the quality of their computing solutions as defined by curricula that lack emphasis on sustainability. However, Africa's contribution to engineering education with a green twist can address this predicament. By integrating sustainability principles into computing and engineering curricula, African higher education institutions (HEI) can pioneer a new generation of professionals equipped with knowledge and skills to develop sustainable green technological solutions. Such an approach will not only address local challenges but will also position Africa as a major contributor to green computing and sustainable engineering practices, which are increasingly crucial in the global effort to mitigate environmental degradation. Using Design Science Research (DSR), incorporating Action Research, this paper discusses the process of formulating a green-friendly computing curriculum for use by five African universities, participating in a European Union-funded project, Grow Green Africa (Gr2A). This hybrid approach to curriculum development ensures the viability of the resulting curriculum and its adaptability and sustainability over time. The designed curriculum incorporates sustainability principles aimed at fostering sustainable practices in the computing sector. The competency-based learning model encompasses knowledge, skills, and dispositions required to execute tasks in various fields of computing. Such an approach transcends the traditional “knowing-what” paradigm and encompasses the “know-how” and “know-why” aspects of applied tasks. Developing competencies in areas such as green computing and sustainability is proposed as vital for meeting the demands and future trends in Southern Africa. By revamping curricula to include sustain ability aspects, higher educational institutions can equip students with the necessary knowledge and skills enabling them to integrate sustainable practices into their computing endeavors, thus reducing the negative impact of computing on the environment. This proactive approach not only promotes environmental stewardship but also aligns with the broader goals of human development and prosperity in the Southern Africa region. Furthermore, it positions Africa as a hub for innovative and sustainable green engineering solutions, contributing to the global effort to address environmental challenges while driving economic growth and social development. This research would also be important to curriculum developers as it gives a clear process to follow when incorporating sustainability concepts into engineering curricula in general and computing in particular.

This innovative practice paper describes Academic or institutional change for Graduate Education. Africa is a continent filled with unutilized young talent. This is due to several factors such as limited access to quality education, especially in engineering and computing. A plugin campus refers to a minibranch or remote campus of a base university (usually from the Global North) that operates in another country (usually in the Global South) at the host university's campus. We report an analysis of a case study, where the University Turku ran its plugin campus at the University of Namibia during 2019–24. Its main aim was to offer studies especially in computing, but also to be a catalyst for the University of Namibia and to co-design digital solutions for African challenges. We report how, throughout its operation, the plugin campus has interacted with various individuals and significantly impacted the lives of many. It has identified and trained local talent that otherwise cannot afford to get any education in computing. The five most important lessons learned are that computing and more widely engineering education have to (1) listen to and learn from the local community's demands, especially by the young people, (2) recognize and support talent beyond formal education, (3) adapt to different cultures for better and mutual learning, (4) rethink the traditional educational models of the Global North to better fit different expectations of people, and (5) dedicate time to and trust to build local partnerships for making a difference in people's lives.

The concepts of sacred places and spaces appear throughout religions globally. Places such as churches, cathedrals, temples, mosques, synagogues and graveyards are given special meanings, both functionally and spiritually, and separated from the ordinary. Recently location-based augmented reality (AR) technologies and applications have become widespread, and this raises questions regarding how AR content relates to sacred places. In this study, we approached this complex topic by asking clergy of the Lutheran Christian Church (N=47) to reflect on associated phenomena. We approached the data via reflexive thematic analysis and uncovered tensions related to (1) connected vs detached from sacredness; (2) supporting the spiritual purpose of the space vs conflicting with it; and (3) maintaining tradition vs embracing innovation. Overall, our findings suggest that AR technologies and products impact sacred spaces on multiple levels, but currently there is no consensus among the clergy on the impact of these changes.

Preparing future graduates for the workplace should involve linkage with industry. Ultimately, students gain valuable insight into real-life projects, preparing them for future careers. However, universities in some developing countries lag in their initiatives to promote industry-academia collaboration. In this paper, we explore how to strengthen academic efforts at the University of Namibia (UNAM) with the assistance of industry in Namibia. In the study, we analyse: 1) current practices of industry collaboration worldwide published in ACM and IEEE digital library through a scoping review, and 2) students' capstone projects conducted in the final year of the Bachelor of Science (Honors) in the computing discipline in 2020 - 2022 at UNAM. The analysis from the scoping review found six (6) different University-Industry Collaboration initiatives employed in universities worldwide. Additionally, the review of current students' theses indicates that they are not aligned with all four key industries in Namibia: Mining, Tourism, Fisheries, and Agriculture. Hence, we contextualised the analysis by reflecting upon the economic drivers and demands of the country. The preliminary outcomes of this study allowed us to propose the incorporation of the Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate model in the computing degree programme that UNAM can adopt in developing an effective curriculum that aligns with the demands of the key relevant industries in Namibia. The aim is to support the development of new talent that will promote the country's economic growth. Reflecting on this process can also benefit other universities in developing countries by assisting them in contextualising their curricula and addressing their local and national requirements.

In the rural town of Opuwo, Namibia, a team of five young people,, have been working since 2017 on their toy car business. We call them street engineers, because, while they are formally unqualified as engineers, they are informally, or streetwise, qualified because they engineer solutions that meet with their customers' demands, with an inventive twist. Recently, the street engineers joined forces with a university research team to extend their range of products to include robotics. The context was interesting for researchers seeking for innovative practice in engineering education, for several reasons. First, it provides a prime example of a local situation where an increasing number of young talents, despite having limited or irrelevant formal engineering education, globally struggle with designing inventive solutions, engineered of components that are available. Secondly, it poses challenges for devising informal approaches for engineering education, complementing contemporary, typically formal approaches. Thirdly, it calls for engineering education that starts from recognizing young people's hunger for improving their livelihoods through fast-tracked learning. Fourthly, the street engineers aim to develop technologies which, by far, extend the existing state-of-the-art in their context, paving the way for the application and even the design of advanced technologies, especially robotics, at the grassroots, a much promoted political slogan in the Global South. The qualitative analysis of the data sourced in the real-life context of the street engineers identified twelve dimensions of limitations that restrict the work, achievements and outcomes of the street engineers. At the same time, the further interpretation of the limitations indicates a range of opportunities by which design or engineering activities, including entry-level robotics, liberates street engineers from the identified limitations. The context shares the characteristics of places where oppressed people globally live, because of the socio-economic profile of Opuwo and the surrounding Kunene region. Paulo Freire suggests that instead of what he calls the banking model of education, where knowledge is deposited in learners' minds and which, hence, does not transform their living conditions, the oppressed only can be liberated by problem-posing education which aims at identifying challenges and then designing disruptive solutions to them, by those that are limited or bound by their poverty. While obtained within a given context, the results of the investigation can be re-contextualized and used for reforming engineering education in the Global South, to be relevant in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In an increasingly diverse, global world, robotics invites the much too often marginalized young people to open their minds for and by engineering novel solutions.

Software engineering education requires a new boost in African higher education, because of the high demand for professionals, caused by the fast increasing internet connections calling for meaningful applications and governmental initiatives like Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and the current situation where universities graduate software engineers that cannot serve in the job markets. Inspired by the Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate (CDIO) model for engineering education and the CATI model for curriculum reform focusing on contextually relevant education in the Global South, we introduce how a complementary model for a conventional university, i.e. metaversity, can enhance software engineering education in Africa. Metaversity uses the full potential of the metaverse, requiring fast internet, and is a balance between access to the globally best expertise for technical problems and design of solutions to contextually relevant problems on site. It combines the global and the local contexts in software engineering education.

Existing communication technologies have displayed a lack of affordances in supporting social-emotional connections, which is of particular interest in educational settings. We are therefore developing a live sensory immersive 3D video technology, built on a prior developed platform. Pilot trials in a Finnish school have yielded promising findings. We continue to advance the state-of-the-art platform in parallel with regards to 3D capture quality and data compression algorithms. Current developments entail joint investigations and evaluations of affordances to support emotional, social, motivational, and achievement impacts with learners and teachers from a Namibian and Finnish school. Participants can experience ”remote presence” wearing the hololens 2 while others are live streamed from another country captured by two cameras.

An increasing trend of digitally enhancing learning provides unique opportunities to expand from local to global learning environments. However, current technologies and educational approaches do not adequately support creative communication and learning for primary school learners across the globe. We maintain that it is important to promote agentic engagement amongst learners by involving them in the design of their own digitally enhanced learning environment. In this study, we connected ten learners from a Namibian and a Finnish school in virtual communications to co-design an interactive map game. Following a research through design approach, we share a detailed account of the case study in which we facilitated a distributed co-design process, using Skype, a custom made VR environment, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We reflect on the co-design sessions, focusing on communication and the design concept evolution contributing to distributed co-design methods and techniques not only for the design community but also as an agentic learning process that could be incorporated into formal learning environments. With a paucity of existing empirical work of geographically distributed co-design with children, our case study provides an empirical foundation pointing at critical issues to be further investigated such as multilingual design, social cohesion, facilitation roles, technologies, design breadcrumbs, negotiations and learner’s pride.

In this Full Paper, we report our experiences of teaching AI in a Namibian university in collaboration with a Finnish university and a few companies. Within the Computing Education Community, only a minority of research reports have experience teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI), and very little research has been conducted on teaching and learning AI in Africa. Given the high importance and impact of AI, this is alarming. Learning and teaching AI in an African higher education setting provides unique challenges compared to the standardized approach in the Global North. Our undergraduate course in AI was carried out in a novel way that emphasized the creative application of AI to meet the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). We chose an approach that helps Computer science graduates to explore and get inspired by the opportunities of AI at the ground.

Engineering brings functionality in the modern world across sectors from healthcare to education. The engineering method for problem solving consists of identifying, defining and structuring a problem and then creatively and systematically solving it. In the process, underlying the surface level thinking, the engineering mindset balances tensions between (1) exactness and ambiguity; (2) the familiar and the unfamiliar; (3) concretizing and abstracting problems; and (4) position within prevailing hierarchies. As a pivotal period of an engineer's professional growth, engineering education influences a student's position within these dimensions. Future engineers are expected to design solutions to increasingly wicked problems that can have ethical, moral and existential aspects. As a solution, several engineering curricula include courses in ethics. While such a course can be useful, it often fails to broaden the core set of the engineering students' epistemic beliefs. Furthermore, there are several ill-defined problems that ethics does not have tools to address. To bring balance to the engineer's epistemic toolkit, whilst still focused on achieving technical skills, we propose to integrate aspects of theology, i.e. the scholarship of existential questions and the ultimate, into engineering education. In this work we present both a theoretical foundation and conceptualization for our proposal which we supplement with findings from an empirical seminar discussion with engineering students and faculty.

A plug-in campus refers to a physical extension of a base university, within the premises of a host university. While academically independent from the host university, a plug-in campus makes use of the host's infrastructure and integrates into the local knowledge and innovation ecosystem. The Future Technology Lab illustrates the role and functions of a Finnish plug-in campus in Namibia, focusing on, but not limited to software engineering education. Introduced as an alternative to a full-scale branch or satellite campus, a plug-in campus emphasizes contextual innovation, collaboration and mutual interaction between the base and host universities that the plugin campus is expected to catalyze and accelerate. The resilient orientation enhances the sustainability of a plug-in campus in the dimensions of economy, environment, society, and ethics.

Work in Progress: In this paper we outline our initial findings on the potential of state-of-the-art immersive telepresence to support the practical and collaborative group work element in our remotely taught international degree programmes, specifically a Software Engineering Masters degree. Whilst we adopt widely used distance learning approaches generally, the challenge remains in supporting live synchronous practical sessions that depend heavily, on one hand, on the expertise of the educator and their presence in the shared learning environment, and on the other hand, the students' active engagement within teams partially distributed physically. Any technical progress in improving the "sense of presence" can radically renew our conceptions of (distance) teaching and learning, maybe also in terms of the 21st century skills or even those that we are not yet aware of. The question to address is that if sufficiently high-fidelity, and unintrusive, immersive capture technology is used then how could this be game changing in this area? Previous work using similar immersive technology has failed to achieve the level of quality or scope necessary, however, the past 4 years have seen significant progress in the hardware and algorithms required. To support our degree programmes we have designed and developed a custom live 3D capture system for a higher fidelity immersive experience targeting small groups of 2-6 people collaborating both locally and remotely. Here we will present the system and scope out some of the initial plausible affordances for education through the Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate (CDIO)-model. We focus on the affordances offered by the technology to support the learning of the much needed competences of communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity which are very challenging to enhance by conventional, content delivery oriented distance learning approaches.

21st century skills are being added onto K-12 educational curricula globally, often via integrating them into existing subjects such as math. Simultaneously music teaching in K-12 education is losing relevance and popularity. Yet, music theory contains logical structures which are in many regards similar to program code. Additionally the digitization of music production requires composers to effectively use digital music production tools and associated technology. We investigate the opportunities technology-assisted music composing offers for teaching 21st skills and programming in K-12 education through expert interviews with professional music composers (n=4) and programmers (n=5). Analysis of the similarities and differences in the thought processes between creating software and composing music revealed the latter to have potential for teaching the following thinking skills present in K-12 educational curricula: modularity, loops and conditionals, data structures, input/output and software design. Additionally implicit learning benefits on increasing technical know-how, cooperative skills and design thinking were discovered.

A workshop on educational robotics introduced (mostly) undergraduate students to basic robotics and sensor technology skills. Creative robotics projects were developed using sensor technologies. At the beginning of the workshop, the participants indicated that they were excited about the workshop. This was confirmed by the data analyzed with the Intrinsic Motivation Instrument where most participants mentioned that they enjoyed, learned, and were able come up with creative projects within a limited time of four days. This was the first time for some to practically assemble and code robots and the first time for many to practically work with robotics sensor technologies. The workshop was a very unique workshop to be held in Namibia, the first of its kind where 1) participants developed creative projects which fostered collaboration between a local university and two international universities; 2) doors were opened for local and international collaborators which contributes to educational robotics growth in Namibia and beyond; and 3) business opportunities were created as projects developed have market potential.

Studies on location-based games ubiquitously report positive learning outcomes for the players. Particularly these games are shown to promote exercise, encourage to social interaction and increase geographical and cartographical knowledge. To find out whether these positive effects are game-specific or characteristic to all location-based games, we conduct a software search for available location-based games on iOS and Android platforms and evaluate if and how exercise, cartographical training and social interaction are supported. Based on our results we were able to identify six sub-genres of location-based games, and the positive effects associated with each genre. The most popular category in terms of number of games was scavenger hunts and the most popular category in terms of active installs on Android and iOS was location-based MMORPG’s. Presence of factors associated with immersion and mixed reality were paired with the popularity and positive outcomes of the games. Cartographi cal practise, social interaction and exercise were supported the most in the location-based MMORPG sub-genre, to which, for example, Pokémon GO belongs to

Technology industry with sufficient ability and investment in research, development and innovation is the core of successful growth of several national economies. Higher education institutions need to provide a wide range of engineers with an increasing level of cross-disciplinary skills. An active, local presence of a university providing degree programs and research in technology has a strong link with the volume and development of the technology industry in the region. While modern technologies, especially information and communication technology (ICT), allow research and development activities to be independent of the location, other sectors of technology industry, such as maritime industry, require significant investments in physical facilities, bound to the region. Governments face two main challenges to maintain their industry's engineering competitiveness: (1) to prepare engineering graduates across expanding ranges of skills and knowledge, and (2) to provide the engineers in the regions where these skills are needed. Southwestern Finland is a region with the fastest growing technology industry in the country. Without a university with a full range of opportunities for academic engineering education in the region, there is an increasing number of job openings that cannot be filled. In Finland, students in engineering connect with the industry already during their studies and, after graduation, tend to stay in the region where they studied. To expose engineering students to the challenges of Southwestern Finland without creating new permanent higher education engineering structures in the region, the Finnish government in 2017 launched FITech, a 5-year project including all the seven Finnish universities offering engineering education. The purpose of FITech is to offer a nationwide cooperative solution to coordinate and provide engineering education and research in all domains of engineering to support the growth of Southwestern Finland region. This paper introduces the foundations and objectives of FITech and using the early indications of its results suggests a framework to evaluate the success of this complex nationwide project. Preliminary outcomes from the perspective of the University of Turku, one of the seven FITech partners, utilizing an adapted version of Hevner et al design science framework, show the challenges in achieving sufficient regional impact by the FITech approach and provide guidance for its ongoing development and implementation.

Music is filled with mathematical relations. When creating music, the composer must keep in mind the rhythm, the notes, and how well they ring with each other. Our aim was to design an application that teaches these relationships and allows users to compose their own songs using numbers. Our work follows the design science research method, and we have co-designed the application together with elementary school students and teachers in Finland. This paper demonstrates the design process and provides an analysis on our design based on data collected from the participants in two separate sessions.

We investigate the influence of counsellors' state of emotions on their emotion perception through annotation agreement of emotions in text. Selected counsellors were tasked to annotate sample corpora from International Survey on Emotion Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR), and students' life stories. We explore the intra and inter-counsellors' annotation agreements of emotions in the corpora during several annotation sections. The results show strong intra-counsellors' annotation agreement of emotions in both corpora, whereas the inter-counsellors' annotation agreement yielded weakly in both corpora. Results also show that counsellors' emotions vary and influence their decisions when analysing emotions in text.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) needs to transform from an information society that consumes information technologies into a knowledge economy that creates technologies. Key domains for transformation include computer science education, research and development. The lack of research culture and support for research activities often results in low research outcomes, and slows down the development of innovative and independent thinkers and problem solvers. To increase research capacities, we have launched a doctoral level computer science research training program between the College of Business Education (CBE), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), School of Computing. This paper discusses the preliminary experiences of planning and setting up that program.

A review of the practical uses of errors in education reveals three contexts where errors have been shown to help: teaching conceptual knowledge, changing students' attitudes and promoting learning skills. Conflictive animations form a novel approach to teaching programming that follows a long tradition on research and development on program animation tools. Conflictive animations link the benefits of errors with program animation tools and programming education. This approach involves presenting to the students conflictive animations that do not animate faithfully the programs or concepts taught. Conflictive animations are versatile enough to cover the fundamental building blocks of programs such as operators, expressions and statements. With conflictive animations a novel set of learning activities can be introduced to computer science classes. This conflictive dimension of activities augments an engagement taxonomy for animation tools at all levels. They are an example of activities that promote critical thinking. A particular implementation of conflictive animations has been empirically evaluated aiming for ecological validity rather than statistical significance. Results indicate that students using conflictive animations improve their metacognitive skills, and, when compared to a control group, their conceptual knowledge improves at a better rate.

A major limitation in the automatic detection of affect, feelings, emotions, sentiments, and opinions in text is the lack of proper differentiation between these subjective terms and understanding of how they relate to one another. This lack of differentiation not only leads to inconsistency in terminology usage but also makes the subtleties and nuances expressed by the five terms difficult to understand, resulting in subpar detection of the terms in text. In light of such limitation, this paper clarifies the differences between these five subjective terms and reveals significant concepts to the computational linguistics community for their effective detection and processing in text.

Millions of text contents and multimedia published on the Web have potential to be shared as the learning contents. However, mobile learners often feel it difficult to extract useful contents for learning. Manually creating content not only requires a huge effort on the part of the teachers but also creates barriers towards reuse of the content that has already been created for e-Learning. In this paper, a text-based content summarizer is introduced to address an approach to help mobile learners to retrieve and process information more quickly by aligning text-based content size to various mobile characteristics. In this work, probabilistic language modeling techniques are integrated into an extractive text summarization system to fulfill the automatic summary generation for mobile learning. Experimental results have shown that our solution is a proper and efficient approach to help mobile learners to summarize important content quickly.

A Pervasive Learning Space (PLS) uses context-awareness to link a virtual world with real world objects. We define viability as the extent to which a given PLS can be adapted to different purposes, and portability to be the extent to which a given PLS can be transferred to a new physical context. Heroes of Koskenniska is a game-based PLS combining mobile technology and a wireless sensor network in a forest context to raise the environmental awareness in a Biosphere Reserve in Finland. The game was built upon a screen-based architecture, and our analysis shows that it has higher portability and viability than a selection of related PLSs. The screen-based architecture is highly viable and portable because it is based on the model-view-controller division. Our preliminary observations indicate that the game helps to increase visitor count of the area and to promote interaction between visitors and nature.

Our research was conducted within a larger HIV and AIDS counseling project in the southern part of Tanzania. We spent six months creating a pilot version of an interactive digital platform that would allow learners to share their experiences with the disease. The platform, called Sura ya UKIMWI (The Face of AIDS), was designed by a team consisting of secondary school children, university counseling students, HIV counseling experts and experts in ICT. We took the case study approach and report on observations and experiences with the participatory design (PD) process and its outcomes, in this specific context. The results of the project indicate that the technology created under the PD paradigm helps students to easily compose their own stories thereby supporting their understanding and reflection on how these stories relate to their own life experiences. Interacting with the stories was entertaining to the students and they could identify the lessons to be learned. The approach can be an alternative to past attempts that mostly imported technology for HIV and AIDS education. Our experience can be used as a guide in establishing similar digital projects in other parts of the HIV and AIDS affected world.

Modern teaching tools, such as educational robotics, require new learning environments. The teacher especially needs to be supported in novel ways. Conflative learning environment is based on the agents collecting data from the learning process. The teacher can build a support environment based on his or her empirical observations from the classroom. An implementation of the conflative learning environment is described and two case studies about the use of system are reported. The results show that agents are useful and efficient in data collection, and that the empirical modelling environment can be used to construct the working classroom models.

The Pielinen Museum has a rich collection of untagged authentic houses, structures, and objects to exhibit. Problems emerge when visitors attempt to establish meaningful connections between the myriad of unmarked exhibits. Additionally, negative attitude towards museums especially among younger generation is a known problem. The LieksaMystpervasive learning environment helps the visitor to discover temporal and thematic connections among exhibits. LieksaMyst's story-based role-playing game is aimed to attract and motivate particularly children and young adults.

Significant amount of text-based knowledge is created in collaborative Web-based environments in the context of education. In order to efficiently utilize all this information, there is a need to provide the users with an easy access to the information they are interested in. To achieve this, various methods of information retrieval (IR) can be used. We analyze six different algorithms for seeking similar sections of text in context of a social mind tool called the Woven stories.

As collaborative learning in general, and pair programming in particular, has become widely adopted in computer science education, so has the use of pedagogical visualization tools for facilitating collaboration. However, there is little theory on collaborative learning with visualization, and few studies on their effect on each other. We build on the concept of the engagement taxonomy and extend it to classify finer variations in the engagement that result from the use of a visualization tool. We analyze the applicability of the taxonomy to the description of the differences in the collaboration process when visualization is used. Our hypothesis is that increasing the level of engagement between learners and the visualization tool results in a higher positive impact of the visualization on the collaboration process. This article describes an empirical investigation designed to test the hypothesis. The results provide support for our extended engagement taxonomy and hypothesis by showing that the collaborative activities of the students and the engagement levels are correlated.

Educational robotics has the potential for improving special needs education and for eliminating barriers to learning if it can be focused squarely on the special needs of children. This case study examines a variety of special needs that have the potential to enrich educational robotic design. Educational robotics should be used to meet the individual needs of children and to expose them to the possibilities of various forms of self-expression and exploration. It should facilitate advanced hands-on programming, increase the rate of two-directional communication between child and robot, and improve the quality of instruction and intervention. We designed this study as a qualitative action research project with eight special needs education children who worked with LEGO® Mindstorms® NXT and Topobo robots over a nine-month period. The research convinced us that properly adapted educational robotics can be suited to a variety of users who have different individual needs.

This paper is about the role of advanced educational tools in fundraising and presents a design solution meant to assess by comparative evaluation the human-machine and human-computer interactions in the case of the fundraising Robo-eLC. The software core of the gynoid robot and its elearning system have been re-modulated based on feedbacks from earlier prototype and integrated into a multimedia kiosk. An avatar is integrated in the new user-interface system to partially substitute the missing gynoid robot and support the userspsila elearning processes. The ongoing testspsila results of the new software show specific efficiencies and deficiencies of the Robo-eLC as fundraising educational tool. The described approach constitutes a viable verification method for the functionality design of the anthropomorphic robots meant for elearning and fundraising activities.

Educational robotics has long been proved an effective tool to enhance teaching effectiveness in scientific fields such as mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science. Teachers working in a robotics classroom, however, face difficulty in the identification of the needs for proper interventions to the students’ learning processes. To tackle this problem, we proposed and implemented an agency architecture which uses software agents to monitor the student activities and robot movements. The implementation is multi-agent based and distributed across a network of student terminals as well as the teacher terminal. As a result, both promising prospects and limitations are revealed in this implementation.

Based on results from the technologies for children with individual needs project and two case projects, we propose a new multidisciplinary framework for research between computer science, educational technology, and special education. The framework presents a way to conduct research that aims at developing new methods for technology-enhanced special education and for developing adaptable software and hardware tools for individual needs in educational settings.

In the IMPDET (International Multidisciplinary PhD Studies in Educational Technology) online study program, students study towards the PhD degree in educational technology. The program brings together international experts in computer science, education, cultural studies, engineering, and other fields in order to prepare future generations of educational technologists to carry out projects that are tailored to a variety of global contexts, however, in a culturally sensitive way. The first IMPDET students started their studies in 2005, and the first courses were run between October 2005 and February 2006. The first experiences indicate the need for student mentoring and an architecture that allows building a real learner community where both supervisors and learners are actively engaged in improving the used learning environments.

Teachers working in robotics classes face a major problem: how to keep track on individual students' or even small groups' progress in a class of 30-40 students. An agency approach to this problem is based on having sensors to monitor students' interaction, robots' movements, and the construction and programming process of robots. The design can be implemented with the Lego Mindstorms set using the IPPE programming environment. The designed architecture works well for monitoring small groups, but needs further work to support teacher's intervention to an individual student's learning process

Educational robotics is used worldwide in education as a learning tool, but surprisingly rarely in special education. In our study educational robotics and the kids' club working model were brought into special education which usually lacks educational technology tools. Through qualitative action research, we have identified various advantages that educational robotics can bring into learning. The robotic tools made it possible for the students to practice and learn many necessary skills, like collaboration, cognitive skills, self-confidence, perception, and spatial understanding. The encouraging results support the second phase of the study that will analyze more concretely how technology should be developed to become more flexible and usable for all learners and what we can learn from students with individual needs through the use of technology

Kids' Club, a university-based technology club, and a company, Abloy Oy, created an intelligent door system in a collaborative innovation creation project. The model applied in the project, that works between school students and the company, is a combination of modern learning concepts and a model for a software project. The model is proposed especially to support beneficial collaboration between the educational community, school students, and the company.

Meaningful learning of information and communication technology (ICT) requires students to understand ICT concepts in their own cultural or societal context. In this study, we hypothesized that grounding ICT education in the local context and using concretizing tools, like programming visualization and intelligent building blocks (I-BLOCKs), would benefit students. We investigated this hypothesis by first developing an introductory ICT course in programming, which applied these strategies, and then by analyzing the results of the course. The course was held at Tumaini University, Iringa University College, Tanzania, in the fall of 2004. Altogether 27 teacher-trainees participated in the course. The outcomes of the course showed that the students understood the main concepts that were taught. They were also able to apply the methods of creative problem solving that were taught in the course. It was also found that students' algorithmically-oriented understanding was not at the desired level and that the course, as well as the future curriculum, needs further development in this particular area.

Five reviewers conducted a methodological review of the full papers in the proceedings of ICALT 2004. They analyzed the papers in terms of research design, common defects, section proportions, measures used, and region of the first author's affiliation. It was found that the majority of articles were methodological/theoretical articles or program descriptions that did not report research on human participants. Of the articles that involved human participants - posttest-only designs without controls were the most common, many articles lacked appropriate interpretations and needed controls, the majority of space was devoted to program description, and student surveys were the most common type of measurement. Recommendations for ICALT authors and reviewers are given.

Implementing new technologies in adaptable robotic appliances based on multidisciplinary approaches creates at least a twofold problem: to properly design the multifaceted robotic behavior and to render as simplified as possibly the maintenance and monitoring of its components. In this article is described an adopted solution for managing a robotic appliance meant for e-learning and e-commerce application, the Robo-eLC. The designed tutoring interface constitutes a learning interface for nonexperts that need to re-design and control the robotic behaviors. By constructing the robotic learning elements, the non-experts acquire, step by step, a deep understanding of ICT means and e-learning contents, becoming in a short period experts of the learning systems they have to manage. The robot, capable of incentivizing customers' interaction via its multimodal interface, can help them in making thoughtful money operations (i.e. donations for chanty activities in the test cases of the ongoing research).

Traditional design methods for digital learning environments are based on rigid approaches, which need substantial resource investments, and do not take into account the needs of sparse learning communities. FODEM (formative development method) is an action-research-oriented method consisting of three components: (1) needs analysis, (2) implementation, and (3) formative evaluation. First, in needs analysis, both theory and practice is used to define specifications. Secondly, in implementation, fast prototyping in authentic learning settings is emphasized. Thirdly, formative evaluation is used to evaluate the use of the environment. The feasibility of the method was illustrated by applying it to two digital learning environments; LEAP (Learning Process Companion) and ViSCoS (Virtual Studies of Computer Science) in sparsely populated region of Finland.

We describe an evaluation of a program animation tool, Jeliot 3. Eye movement data, interaction data, and audio and video protocols were recorded for sixteen participants comprehending three Java programs. In this paper, we report and analyze a subset of the captured data, the patterns of visual attention in time and space during animation of a program. We discuss the possible potentials and prospects of using eye-gaze as an interaction and evaluation modality for building intelligent, gaze-aware program animation tools.

We describe a novel approach to algorithms concretization that extends the current mode of software visualization from computer screens to the real world. The method combines hands-on robotics and traditional algorithm visualization techniques to help diverse learners comprehend the basic idea of the given algorithm. From this point of view the robots interpret an algorithm while their internal program and external appearance determine the role they have in it. This gives us the possibility to bring algorithms into the real physical world where students can even touch the data structures during the execution. In the first version, we have concentrated on a few sorting algorithms as a proof-of-concept. Moreover, we have carried out an evaluation with 13-to-15-year-old students who used the concretization for gaining insight into one sorting algorithm. The preliminary results indicate that the tool can enhance learning. Now, our aim is to build an environment that supports both visualizations and robotics based concretizations of algorithms at the same time.

We present a program visualization tool called Jeliot 3 that is designed to aid novice students to learn procedural and object oriented programming. The key feature of Jeliot is the fully or semi-automatic visualization of the data and control flows. The development process of Jeliot has been research-oriented, meaning that all the different versions have had their own research agenda rising from the design of the previous version and their empirical evaluations. In this process, the user interface and visualization has evolved to better suit the targeted audience, which in the case of Jeliot 3, is novice programmers. In this paper we explain the model for the system and introduce the features of the user interface and visualization engine. Moreover, we have developed an intermediate language that is used to decouple the interpretation of the program from its visualization. This has led to a modular design that permits both internal and external extensibility.

The global information society is evolving at breakneck speed but developing countries are left behind. The technology of Simputer, simple hand-held computer, has been developed to bridge the digital divide. We developed a programming tutorial on the Simputer platform and tested the learning environment in a Tanzanian context. An analysis of the students' feedback shows the feasibility of Simputer as a learning platform, and a technical comparison with competing technologies indicates the potential of Simputer in developing countries. A possible future application of Simputer is HIV/AIDS education for rural schools and villages.

The design model behind software development is crucial for the result. Successful digital learning tool should meet the needs of the learner in different situations. Formative development model (FODEM) gives us utensils to create new learning tools. This paper is a concrete example of FODEM in action. We analyze how FODEM has been used in the development of digital learning tool LEAP.

Jeliot is a family of program animation systems [1]. It has been successfully used to improve the teaching of intro- ductory programming by supplying a concrete language in which to explain programming structures and concepts [2]. Jeliot 3 [4] retains the novice-oriented GUI and animation display of the previous version, Jeliot 2000. Both versions automatically visualize the execution of user-written Java programs.Jeliot 3 introduces a new kind of design in order to make the system extendable and to add new features [5]. The front-end of system has been replaced by the DynamicJava interpreter, which was instrumented to produce an intermediate code, MCode, describing the program's runtime trace. The MCode trace is then rendered by the graphics back-end. The previous version of Jeliot animated variables, expressions, I/O and static method calls. Jeliot 3 is also capable of animating concepts for object-oriented programming: objects, class inheritance, constructors, method calls, instance fields, and reference semantics of arrays and objects. Jeliot 3 is intended to be a simple tool to be used in different kinds of learning scenarios [3]. It can be used to show and teach the basics of programming during a lecture. The lecturer can explain different concepts and show their corresponding animations with Jeliot. Students may use Jeliot 3 by themselves after the lectures to complete and understand the follow-up assignments related to the concepts learned at the lectures. Jeliot 3 can be used as a tool in interactive laboratory sessions. The visual display of the program can be used to facilitate communications about the errors. It can also support virtual courses, as where Jeliot 3 provides a tool that can assist students when external help is not available. Jeliot 3 is available under the GPL for downloading at http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/jeliot/. We intend to form a community around Jeliot 3, where teachers, students and developers could propose ideas and solutions in order to im- prove Jeliot 3 and the teaching of programming. The forum is available on the website and open for anyone interested. There are also plans for further development, for example, a new tool called JeCo (Jeliot Collaborative) [3] aims to integrate Jeliot 3 into a co-authoring environment where students can develop and visualize their programs together.

Classroom pair-programming activities have been found to support novice student's learning during basic programming courses. However, there are very few tools that could support pair or group programming in distance education courses. Here, we explain the new concept of collaborative program visualization and present a tool to support it, called JeCo, that can help students work together on a platform that supports both collaborative authoring and program visualization

Visualization of the learning processes is a powerful way to help students to understand their curricula and the structure behind them. CME2 is a prototype software of this favourable concept, visualizing the learning process as a graph. With this tool students and teachers can easily handle and plan their personal curricula in larger scale and see the connections between different courses. The tool enables comparison between other students' curricula with set operations and it can be used as a planning tool for future studies. Within the teacher-student interaction this tool can be used as an effective aid for counselling.

A human size interacting robot called RoboBeggar is a dedicated learning appliance capable of bankcard-based swift money transfers, providing information on relevant issues, giving advice on how to contribute to help needy people. RoboBeggar helps people to understand where and why resources are needed. Thanks to a bankcard reader it gives the facility to donate money in a quick and efficient way. Both charity organisations as well as donors benefit from this interdisciplinary project with flavours of education, robotics, cognitive science and computer science.

Concept learning belongs to the fundamental challenges of educational technology. Contrary to the current trend of designing and implementing contents for various web-based virtual courses, concept learning requires cognitive tools rather than digital materials. We introduce a novel scheme to generate computer games from concept maps made by a teacher or a learner herself. Concept gaming exceeds the potential of previous software packages for concept mapping in a significant feature: it adds excitement and tension to the process of building a meaningful composition of concepts related to each other. In addition, concept gaming supports learning at various levels, from memorizing up to open problem solving.

The distance education field offers several potential data sources for data mining applications. These applications can help both instructors and students in the web-based learning setting. One of the interesting aspects of data mining in education is to collect and interpret the information from several courses. This information can be used for example to assign heterogeneous groups in programming courses or projects and to evaluate the actual learning.

The ability to support students' learning processes efficiently during Web-tutored programming project course is a key factor to success. In order to enrich the supportive efforts we need to build specific environments to fulfill this requirement. One of the most interesting methods to be used in such environment are various problem-solving tools which help the student to solve relevant problems in a creative way. The environment equipped with such tools could both support students in various situations and ease the workload of the instructors in the tutoring task.

In Fall 2000, University of Joensuu offered for the first time a Web-based university level Computer Science course to high school students in the surrounding rural region of North Karelia. To improve the course design, a formative evaluation scheme was developed for monitoring learning outcomes and identifying existing problems, pedagogical as well as technical. An analysis of the feedback given by those who dropped out of the pilot program offered important insights to the difficulties encountered by the students especially during the programming course. The main reasons for quitting were the problems to synchronize high school and university studies, given tight time constraints. Use of arrays and designing methods proved to be among the most difficult topics of programming. Based on the analyzed feedback, the curriculum has been modified to fit better to students' potential.

The purpose of a Web based counseling and evaluation system is to serve students and other interest groups of a virtual university. To develop a competent system requires careful design. We describe the requirements of our system, and specifically we discuss the criteria we have created to evaluate existing counseling systems. Criteria work as guidelines when designing a counseling system. The evaluation process helps us to construct technically more solid solutions for the needs of the Finnish virtual university counseling and evaluation system.

No abstract available.

As an interdisciplinary topic, program visualization research needs a comprehensive approach, in order to be useful for college education and research, as well as software engineering. This main challenge consists of several aspects, like developing efficient visualization techniques, composing attractive pilot environments, analyzing visualizations from the cognitive point of view, creating functional taxonomies to compare various environments, supporting teamwork in algorithm design and programming, and designing field testing methods to evaluate a given visualization environment.

A pilot project between two institutions of computer science, one in Finland and the other in Tanzania, reveals potentials and risks of a collaborative learning framework. Two groups, one from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and the other from the Computing Centre of the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, were designing a web-based environment for learning the Java programming language. Preliminary experiences indicate that the challenges of the scheme fall into at least four categories, namely those of technicalities, organizational aspects, attitudes, and cultural differences.

We consider how to create animations with Microsoft Excel. We present the capabilities of the drawing and auditing tools, dynamic graphs, and special effects of cells. Combining these features with the integrated Visual Basic programming language provides the user with an easy-to-use platform for versatile educational visualisations.

CLAP is a pedagogical approach for Computer Science education, applied here especially to laboratory courses. CLAP or Creative Lab with Active Participation provides an open learning environment, utilizing creative problem solving methods. For successful learning, CLAP emphasizes group processes. Pilot courses using CLAP were carried out during the Fall Semester of 1996 and the Spring Semester of 1997.

Understanding of fundamental algorithms and designing algorithms for a novel problem are basic skills in Computer Science. Animation is a useful aid in both these areas. We show how to animate algorithms with Microsoft Excel using data visualization and macro programming features of Excel. The user writes an algorithm using the Visual Basic programming language of Excel and defines charts visualizing dynamically the data structures of the algorithm. This approach is suitable especially for small-scale animation, e.g. for course assignments in Computer Science.