TAG | spatial ability test
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Campinas, Brazil: Spatial ability tests at Padre Emilio Miotti school – Video
0 Comments | Posted by Philippe in project
In addition to my earlier post.
Some footage taken during the spatial ability tests in Campinas, Brazil has now been compiled to a nice video, covering our activities at the Padre Emilio Miotti School
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Campinas, Brazil: Spatial ability tests at Padre Emilio Miotti school
3 Comments | Posted by Philippe in project
After holding the workshop in Sao Jose dos Campos, the team from the Institute for Geoinformatics, Münster headed to Campinas to perform a series of tests on spatial ability of children at the school “Padre Emilio Miotti” in Campinas. These tests and activities were made in cooperation and with the support of the NIED, an institute of UNICAMP. We would like them to thank them for help and support.
The tests conducted there followed the same pattern as the tests performed in Kigali, Rwanda last year and at St. Mauritz school in Muenster. First a pre-test to assess the spatial abilities was performed by the children, then they used the Geo-Activity (developed by Henning) on OLPC´s XO laptops. The main goal of this activity is to foster the spatial learning of kids. This was then verified by a second round of post-tests with the kids. The results of this testing will be incorporated into Thomas Ph.D. Thesis.
The activity is now deployed onto a significant number of XO-laptops at this school, and at the end of June, Philippe Rieffel will participate in an event to teach the teachers how to use this software in the future. To ensure the future use and to thank the school and NIED for their support, the GL@PS left 6 GPS-receivers at the school, which are necessary to use the software, since the XO 1.5 does not have a build in GPS chip.
Philippe will stay with NIED for some more time to work on the software deployment as well as to do research for his upcoming Master´s Thesis (more on this will be posted soon).
Some Impressions from the work at school:
On the 11th of June, a group of students from the ifgi and some staff members from GL@PrimarySchool conducted another field test in a school around Muenster. The students are involved through the frame of a seminar, which is offered this semester by the GL@PrimarySchool staff. The topic of this seminar is ‘Geospatial learning with OLPC’, in this context, the students planned and conducted some usability tests for the XO-laptops, handheld-GPS and paper maps as well. The group was as well accompanied by 2 guys that were doing some recording for our upcoming GL@PrimarySchool image movie; stay tuned for further news on this. (weiterlesen…)
On the first day at Kagugu Primary School we started with our pre-tests on the childrens spatial abilities. We are working with class P5C (5th grade),working in two shifts. This huge school with around 4000 pupils works from 7:20 – 11:40 and from 12:40 – 17:00. The first shift in P5C has 54 pupils, the second 53, the kids are between 9 and 17 years old. Quite a big age difference. In the beginning, we told them what will happen during this exiting week and intruduced them in the world of maps somehow. Surprisingly (Uranyemeje in Kinyarwanda) the children had few experience with maps. We started drawing a world map and let them draw maps of the classroom on the board, what ended up in our first spatial ability task: “Draw a map of the school ground”.
A “Mental Rotation Test”, Piaget’s “Water-Level-Task” and a “Spatial Orientation Test” followed. We also asked the children about our symbols in the activity, especially the categories for geotagging (e.g. agriculture, water…). This little study (n=100) will give us a hint, if our symbols are intercultural and understandable.
In the break between the shifts we had some time for a little flash back and to inspect the school’s one laptop per child policy 
Our first full school day ended with a group picture and a first cloning session in the office. We needed to prepare the first laptops for the single-user-tests starting on Tuesday.
