Calkin Suero Montero

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Information Technology

We recognize the conceptual and technical challenges of orches- trating remote presence and determining spatial features within mixed reality educational contexts. We maintain that involving stakeholders, such as primary students in early stage development of 3D immersive video technology is important to provide guidance for further technical devel...

Background: Previous research regarding unresponsiveness in peer interaction, including participants on the autism spectrum (AS), is mainly based on predefined categorizations of unresponsiveness; thus, there is a need for conversation analytic research to examine unresponsiveness from participants’ perspectives. Method: Multimodal conversation ana...

Student engagement is a fundamental construct that supports learning. As immersive technologies develop, their implementation in educational contexts grows, for instance, through the deployment of mixed reality (MR) environments. This forges the need to explore the strategies that teachers use to deliver their lessons in order to increase student e...

Although the significance of a positive social classroom climate in face-to-face learning has been established, its role within online and technology-enhanced learning environments is unclear. The central aim of this systematic review was to synthesize the findings of empirical studies which have examined any aspect of the social classroom climate...

The success of the teaching - learning process in terms of learning outcomes is determined by several factors, primarily the lecturer’s teaching approach used. Despite the importance of the teaching approach, little is known concerning the teaching approaches used by mathematics lecturers in Tanzanian higher education institutions. This study explo...

The European Commission calls for schools to move towards becoming open to their communities, integrating external social, civil, and expert stakeholders into authentic learning experiences’ development alongside teachers and students, particularly in terms of science education. However, little research or practical implementation has been reported...

The task of processing natural language automatically has been on the radar of researchers since the dawn of computing, fostering the rise of fields such as computational linguistics and human–language technologies [...]

"Academic engagement refers to the overall quality of students’ involvement with schooling, including their activities and goals, as well as their connections with peers and educators. Much research has examined the facilitation and support of students’ academic engagement within physical classroom settings. However, the field of education has been...

Current immersive technology applications, such as virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), are still limited in providing an immersive experience in which a user is perceived in 3 dimensions (3D) as their real self. Furthermore, research on such immersive environments applied to educational contexts is scarce. To investigate the unexplored opportuni...

Our digital society is characterised by pervasive use of technology, traversing almost all dimensions of our everyday life, even more so now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pushes educational systems to deploy science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education more efficiently and to foster digital competences, all of which...

Given the reported state of cognitive and affective disengagement with STEM (science) learning in youth due, in part, to a disconnection between school learning activities and young people lived experience together with the increasing demand for science related professionals in Europe, it is fundamental to find innovative ways to re-engage students...

p class="0abstract">This study reports the demonstration of the effectiveness of a mobile education tool (MET) that was co-designed and developed at the College of Business Education (CBE) in Tanzania by a team of teachers, researchers, and a developer using the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. The demonstration of the CBEMET Prototype as...

Previous work in learning analytics have been fruitful in shedding lights on collaborative learning environments, such work has provided insights and recommendations that helped improve the collaborative process in computer-mediated learning environments. Given the importance of social interactions and their influence on learning (e.g., in determin...

One of the aims of teaching and learning mathematics is to encourage and enable learners to become confident in using mathematics to analyze and solve practical problems in real-life situations. However, while a few students prosper in learning of mathematics, many students find it difficult and ultimately fail the subject. This study analyses stud...

Previous work in learning analytics have been fruitful in shedding lights on collaborative learning environments, such work has provided insights and recommendations that helped improve the collaborative process in computer-mediated learning environments. Given the importance of social interactions and their influence on learning (e.g., in determin...

Mobile learning (m-learning) through mobile devices has been playing a significant role in enhancing teaching and learning in higher education institutions (HEIs). However, little is known about the readiness of both teachers and students to extend the traditional face-to-face pedagogy into using their mobile devices for mobile learning. This study...

Digital fabrication consists of a range of techniques used to create products from digital designs. For the development of the digital citizen, digital literacy is a fundamental skill that digital fabrication could assist in developing. However, the main question is how to support education systems in order to promote fundamental skills, since the...

Badges have been used in education and leisure activities to accredit knowledge or learning for a long time. Digital badges in particular have been reported to become a gamification element fostering students’ engagement and motivation. In our work, we explore the use of digital badges during digital fabrication and making activities as a way to fo...

One of the priorities of 21st century skills development involves boosting creativity in education. That is because creativity is considered essential to the rapidly evolving digital society employment landscape alongside entrepreneurship, critical thinking, collaboration skills and computational fluency. In this paper we present our pilot tests us...

An ongoing trend shows young students in K12 develop resistance towards science learning and science careers. Tackling this issue to bring back the interest and motivation of students in science and technology learning, we present here the progress of the open science schooling project. The project proposes that science - learning processes should...

Digipack Pro is a backpack that facilitates youngsters' social interactions and promotes playful activities during social encounters. It combines wearables technologies with universal design practices to transform an everyday item into a tool that supports social inclusion and well-being. Here we present our contextualisation of the Digipack Pro fr...

Digital technology is radically changing people's lives and work in industry, finance, services, media and commerce, and this requires a change in the education and training arena as well. However, changes in educational practices are taking a long time to reflect the increasingly pervasive use digital technologies in our 21st century society. In t...

The use of ICT tools in mathematics instructions has been proved to have a positive impact on students’ success. However, little is known about the ICT readiness of both teachers and students to incorporate these tools in mathematics teaching-learning process. This study investigates the readiness of teachers and students to integrate ICT in mathem...

Design science research (DSR) is a well-known methodology that uses design as a tool for the development of both practical research resulting in an artefact solution, and theoretical scientific knowledge resulting in improved design processes. In this paper, we advocate strengthening the DSR methodology by including elements of co-creation and co-d...

Mobile marketing apps have been progressively employed as business gadget innovations in developing economies. Research has acknowledged a number of encounters between women entrepreneurs and innovation opportunities. One identified opportunity is the application of technology to enable women entrepreneurs' access to market information with ease. T...

Teachers and students in higher education institutions use mobile technologies in teaching and learning. However, in Tanzanian higher education institutions (HEIs), there is little known regarding to perspectives of teachers and students on the usefulness of mobile technologies on teaching and learning. A modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)...

Advancements in mobile technologies have brought forth substantial opportunities for enhancing teaching and learning environments in higher education. Based on the technology infrastructure available and teachers’ mobile technology use, this study applies the technology acceptance model (TAM) to investigate the teachers’ usage and acceptance of the...

Students’ learning of and performance in mathematics is affected by a number of factors, including students’ attitude towards the subject, teachers instructional practices, and school environment. This study was conducted to investigate students’ attitudes towards learning mathematics in Tanzania. It also sought to ascertain reasons for the liking...

Women entrepreneurs are key players in the economic development of societies in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, research has reported that business and technology incubators offer insufficient support to their enterprises. Consequently, this paper sets out to explore and highlight the present status of the contribution of business and technology incub...

Science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) learning is a promising way to engage learners, both males and females in the process of inquiry in order to become active makers, designers and innovators. A learning ecosystem that integrates a suitable pedagogical approach as well as technological tools could facilitate this process. This w...

This paper briefly presents emerging ideas for research about integrating computing educational practices, such as inquiry-based STEAM workshops merged with digital fabrication, into teacher education to foster student teachers' professional agency. Potential outcomes and benefits for both fields are discussed.

Curricular changes towards fostering computational thinking through programming activities for students of all ages are spreading rapidly throughout Europe. However, students may be negatively biased or not interested or prepared to engage in such activities. This work proposes digital fabrication within a hands-on pedagogical frame as an approach...

Teams of students creating digital artefacts using crafts, 3D printing, electronics, microcontrollers, and computer programming can result in significant science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) learning. An ecosystem of carefully selected tools, diverse project ideas, and a well-designed pedagogic structure can greatly facili...

The Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research is a single-track conference dedicated to publishing high quality work in all areas of teaching and learning in the computing disciplines. The 17th Koli Calling was held in November 2017, as per tradition, in the Koli National Park in Finland, organized by the University of E...

The use of mobile technologies is playing an increasingly important role in early childhood education (ECE) settings. However, although technologies are often integrated in ECE provided in day care centres, technology use in other ECE settings, such as in family day care, is rare. In this paper, we describe the Digi-bag, a tablet-based mobile learn...

Given the challenges associated with the analysis of emotions in text by counsellors, we present an intelligent e-counselling system for automatic detection of emotions and sentiments in text. The system- EmoTect- was developed using a supervised support vector machine learning classifier. Therefore, students’ life stories were collected and develo...

Students’ academic achievement is largely driven by their social phenomena, which is shaped by social influence and opinion dynamics. In this paper, we employed a machine learning technique to detect social influence and sentiment in text-based students’ life stories. The life stories were first pre-processed and clustered using k-means with euclid...

The growth of the maker movement has created a demand to include tools for digital fabrication in the school curriculum to foster STEAM education. Yet, the tools used by the maker movement remain sparse and do not exist integrated in the same environment for educational purposes. In this paper, we introduce a smart learning environment that collect...

Women entrepreneurs have significant contributions to the economies of sub-Saharan Africa. However, women in this region are facing a shocking array of challenges in their business environment. This paper examines the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in the food processing industry in Iringa, Tanzania. The study employs interviews and focus gr...

The current curricular changes across Europe towards the inclusion of computational thinking through coding in comprehensive schools have prompted new challenges for teachers that may not be confident nor have a scripted pedagogy to teach the core concepts, as well as for students that may have a negative bias towards such subjects. In this poster,...

In human culture, storytelling is a long-established tradition. The reasons people tell stories are manifold: to entertain, to transfer knowledge between generations, to maintain cultural heritage, or to warn others of dangers. With the emergence of the digitisation of media, many new possibilities to tell stories in serious and non-entertainment c...

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: India, the United Kingdom and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in India employ dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact...

Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research is held toward the end of each year at Koli National Park in the centre of Finland. This cold time of year in Finland is well matched by a warm and inviting conference atmosphere. The conference is dedicated to scholarship of teaching and learning, and to education research in th...

Science, technology, engineering and math education has been expanded by the inclusion of the arts as an integral area. As such, STEAM education is posed to be gender inclusive and accessible for all levels of technical abilities. In this paper, we present our work on the inclusion of the arts into robotics education through the theater robotics co...

Parental participation during children’s free-time activities, schooling, and therapy is of core importance. However, parents’ participation in long-term technology development is very rare, even though its importance has been widely noted. This paper looks at technology co-development with parents within informal learning club contexts for childre...

Women entrepreneurs' usage of mobile technology such a cellphone has been increasing intensely in Sub-Saharan Africa. However there is limited knowledge on the extent and precise usage of mobile phones by women entrepreneurs for accessing market information. Hence to address this gap, the goal of this paper is to investigate the usage of mobile tec...

The Maker Movement emerged from a renewed interest in the physical side of innovation following the dot-com bubble and the rise of the participatory Web 2.0 and the decreasing costs of many digital fabrication technologies. Classifying concepts, i.e. building taxonomies, is a fundamental practice when developing a topic of interest into a research...

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’ annot...

Understanding the causes of spikes in the emotion flow of influential social media users is a key component when analyzing the diffusion and adoption of opinions and trends. Hence, in this work we focus on detecting the likely reasons or causes of spikes within influential Twitter users’ emotion flow. To achieve this, once an emotion spike is ident...

Traditionally, work on sentiment analysis focuses on detecting the positive and negative attributes of sentiments. To broaden the scope, we introduce the concept of enduring sentiments based on psychological descriptions of sentiments as enduring emotional dispositions that have formed over time. To aid us identify the enduring sentiments, we prese...

This paper reports a comparative study in a Finnish school and a British school of the emotional associations made by 10-11-year-olds with their school grounds. Colour and symbol associations were used as a stimulus for getting students to engage with their school grounds, describe their feelings about them, and produce a lexicon of ‘emotion words’...

Learning analytics is an emerging field of research, which deals with collecting and analysing data about learners and their learning context, as well as developing solutions that utilise the analysed data. Traditionally, learning analytics methods focus on the analysis of learners' digital trails or numerical big data, e.g., online material access...

Research has shown that writing styles are influenced by an extensive array of factors that includes text genre and author’s gender. Going beyond the analysis of linguistic features, such as n-grams, stylometric variables and word categories, this paper presents an exploratory study of the role that emotions expressed in writing play to aid discrim...

A considerable amount of effort has been made to reduce the physical manifestation of antisocial behaviour (ASB) in communities. However, the key to the early detection of ASB is, in many cases, in observing its manifestations in written language, which has not been studied in detail. In this work, we search for linguistic features that pertain to...

Learning diaries are instruments through which students can reflect on their learning experience. Students' sentiments, emotions, opinions and attitudes are embedded in their learning diaries as part of the process of understanding their progress during the course and the self-awareness of their goals. Learning diaries are also a very informative f...

In this paper we present the design research agenda at the educational technology laboratory (edTech), University of Eastern Finland. This research agenda involves the development of innovative technology that is meaningful to tackle real societal problems. This paper shows some examples of the problems tackled through the implementation of a rigor...

The current paper explores the use of the social network platform Facebook, as a source of emotion annotated textual data as well as a source of annotators. The traditional approach of hiring experts to provide manually labeled (annotated) data for NLP research is time-consuming, tedious and expensive. Hence, crowdsourcing has emerged as a useful m...

Trust in leadership is significantly influenced by the current IT dominated business environment. We introduce TrustAider, a model for supporting trust building in a business environment through the use of text analysis methods and an interactive user interface. TrustAider integrates natural language processing technologies to provide feedback and...

The automatic analysis of emotional content of text has become pervasive and has been applied in many fields of research. The work reported in this paper is in particular interest-ed in modeling antisocial behavior and the emotional states that define it. We introduce the antisocial behavior detection (ASBD) model for portraying the emotions pertai...

With gesture-based interactions in mobile settings becoming more popular, there is a growing concern regarding the social acceptance of these interaction techniques. In this paper we begin by examining the various definitions of social acceptance that have been proposed in the literature to synthesize a definition that is based on how the user feel...

This paper presents the results obtained during the application of automatically generated open-domain trivial dialogue phrase databases to conversational partners. The databases were generated by a language independent algorithm. Evaluative experiments were carried out for English and Spanish. Results show the applicability of the analyzed phrase...

This paper describes an ongoing work on the generation and the automatic evaluation of trivial dialogue phrases. The described system uses a genetic algorithm (GA)-like transfer approach and n-grams frequency information obtained from the Web in order to automatically generate and evaluate phrases. The experiments present promising results, showing...

This paper describes the analysis of weak local coherence utterances during human- computer conversation through the appli- cation of an emergent data mining tech- nique, data crystallization. Results reveal that by adding utterances with weak local relevance the performance of a baseline conversational partner, in terms of user satisfaction, showe...

This paper describes a novel approach for the automatic generation and evaluation of a trivial dialogue phrases database. A tri- vial dialogue phrase is dened as an ex- pression used by a chatbot program as the answer of a user input. A transfer-like ge- netic algorithm (GA) method is used to generating the trivial dialogue phrases for the creation...

Chance discovery is being applied to a wide range of branches of science fundamentally when there are events that are difficult to find or predict. In this paper we present a summary of the application of chance discovery techniques to the processing of natural language, focusing on the analysis of human-computer chat.

It has been said that there is something deeply touching about creating something and then having a chat with it. Machines in general, and more specifically computers, are not the exception to that tendency. In fact, since the Turing dissertation "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", machines' ability to perform a human-like conversational behavi...

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has fundamentally chan- ged computing. The ubiquity of HCI can be seen in several kinds of application areas, such as text editing, hypertext, gesture recognition, and the like. Since HCI is concerned with the joint performance of tasks by humans and machine, human-computer conversational interaction plays a central...

The ubiquity of chance discovery can be seen in many areas of application, fundamentally when there are events that are difficult to find or predict. In this paper, we present our idea of applying a chance discovery tool, the KeyGraph, for identifying relationship of co-occurrence between the utterances of the interlocutors during a chat section.

It has been said that there is something deeply touching about creating something and then having a chat with it. Machines in general, and more specifically computers, are not the exception to that tendency. In this paper, the introductory idea of considering human chat as a critically self-organized interaction is presented, being its structure po...

Natural language question answering (QA) systems that aim to find an accurate answer to a given question have the power to revolutionize computer applications. This paper presents an approach to QA system in which the application not only aims to find a suitable answer to a question but also tries to bring the user-computer interaction closer to hu...

The main purpose of question answering (QA) is to find an accurate answer to a given question. During research on QA systems in open domain, we understood that, in many cases the information that can be extracted from a question is not enough in order to find a suitable response; to be specific, for the purpose of answering a user’s question, addit...

Without Abstract

This paper describes an approach to natural language generation for Spanish language. The proposed system automatically generates and evaluates Spanish trivial phrases using a genetic algorithm (GA)-like transfer approach and n-gram frequency information obtained from the Web. The experiment showed the encouraging results of a 79.06% user understan...

The main purpose of question answering (QA) is to find an accurate answer to a given question. In order to correctly answer a given question it is necessary understand to a certain degree what type of information the question is asking for; that is to say, what type of question is being asked. This information can be obtained through a good questio...

It has been said that there is something deeply touching about creating something and then having a chat with it. Machines in general, and more specifically computers, are not the exception to that tendency. However, in spite of the accelerated advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the barrier of computer 'understanding' and naturally communica...