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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:
Sorry for being absent for so long time. Thomas became father for the first time (congratulations again Thomas!) and me was quite busy since I finished my study. Getting into working life takes more time as I thought .. However, we found it very important to sum up our work we did so far in a short film. Not only for us but also for others who want to get an idea of (weiterlesen…)
The papers we submitted to the ESRI International User Conference 2010 (July 12–16, San Diego, California) and the ESRI 2010 conference (April 27–29, Darmstadt, Germany) were accepted. Furtheron, the results of our first usability tests are going to be presented at the Second Workshop on Geographic Information Usability taking place on March 23rd in London, Great Britain.
Additionaly, there is a new job opportunity for students, sponsored by ESRI, dealing with the development of an ESRI- and OLPC-based GIS environment. This will enable teachers to prepare geo-games and to analySe data collected in the field in order to support the children’s perception and understanding of their environment at local, regional and global scale. Schools will be enabled to communicate and exchange geospatial data on their respective local environment. The job will be combined with a Bachelor thesis.
Yesterday we had our second big project meeting in Münster, this time in the ifgi rooms. All partners, 52north, ESRI Germany and Rwanda, ifgi and GI@School were present. The most important topics were past and oncoming usability tests (both in Münster and Kigali), global data sharing including import/export scenarios and near future implementation focuses. Furthermore we scheduled a second Hack-Night for March 15th which will hopefully be as well attended as the first one.
On upcoming Friday (2009-11-06) we’d like to invite you visiting our information event on our project GeospatialLearning@PrimarySchool.
Here, the formal invitation:
The OLPC project aims to establish possibilities on education for children in developing countries via E-learning.
Within context of the GI@School initiative and the activities of ESRI Germany GmbH in Rwanda we develop a geoinformation module for the XO-1/1.5 Laptop. We target an evaluation of spatial learning with the use of computers in primary schools.
We want to inform about the project itself and the XO laptop. If you’re interested, please feel encouraged to take part on an analogues workshop (date is not fix yet).
The project comprises pedagogic and technical aspects. The contents are interesting for Bachelor/Master theses (e.g. Usability). Please come by at the
Seminarraum 3rd floor (German) in the Weseler Straße 253
Friday, 6th November 2009, 15–16.30
