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BingBee @ RaglanRoad - A field trial with unattended educational kiosks
Abstract
A pod of ten unattended “behind-the-glass” computer kiosks has been running at the Raglan Road Multipurpose Centre in Grahamstown for more than three years. The goal is to enhance computational thinking skills, and to provide logic, mathematical, reading and computer literacy skills via edutainment and fun. The technology is explicitly engineered so that usage is not dependent on having willing teachers as supervisors. Initially targeted at 7-13 year old children, we've had to make adaptations for younger children from the on-site pre-primary school. We describe the innovative mechanism that allows unattended access while securing and protecting our systems. We give a brief overview of the technology and content on the kiosks, the implementation, and some observations about usage. Unusually, the project was conceived and initiated from a technical perspective, and we discuss some issues that have arisen around maintenance and division of responsibilities between the parties involved.
... HITW and OLPC reflected the culture of their designers. While HITW reflected a collective view of ownership and knowledge sharing that is common in India, OLPC ownership and its 1:1 model reflected an individualism perspective that tends to prevail in developed and Western countries [43]. The significant improvements achieved by both projects in their native context were challenged in other cultural settings such as the applications of HITW in UK, or Tanzania [39], [42], and OLPC implementations in RCC. ...
The growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) adop-tion in emerging economies and more broadly Resource-Challenged Com-munities (RCC) motivates the exploration of Blended Learning (BL), a learning mode that mixes face-to-face and technology-mediated instruction. BL has the potential of broadening accessibility to quality learning anytime and anywhere. This article contributes a theoretical perspective for design-ing BL environments in RCC. It synthesizes findings from BL literature and lessons distilled from iconic educational technology projects in RCC to envision a pathway forward that consists of three design heuristics to ad-dress that the contextual challenges in RCC: localizing the problem, em-bracing the complex and nuanced use of technology, and balancing autono-my and scaffolding to support students.
... Using low-cost interfaces for educational entertainment (edutainment) applications was introduced in [22], and [25]. An information kiosk was designed including a computer that was fully contained behind a shop window. ...
The Egyptian education system faces urgent challenges. Proposed governmental reforms tend to focus on increasing access to physical and digital resources. There is insufficient understanding as to how the provided resources are currently used in rural areas. We explored the extent to which digital technology could motivate primary students to collaboratively learn a challenging topic in the National Mathematics Curriculum. We designed and researched a digital game to support memorizing multiplication facts. We used an incentive structure that encouraged individual learning with rewarding teamwork. The game was tested with mixed ability and gender groups of students using the Teams-Game-Tournament collaboration technique. A key outcome was that the students with educationally disadvantaged backgrounds benefited from using the game format. They devised their own play and study strategies. We discuss implications on future designs of the game, and considerations for its integration in Egyptian schools.
... Over the past five years our BingBee project [8] has endeavoured to indirectly build early childhood SET skills in computing, logic, language and mathematics. Located in an underprivileged area, it provides access to a range of edutainment activities running on unsupervised computer kiosks (Fig. 1). ...
Maths is presently regarded as the key driver that underpins Science, Education and Technology (SET) skills. In spite of significant studies, investment and efforts, math skills and widespread enthusiasm for SET remain elusive. In South Africa's disadvantaged communities, poor quality maths teaching and poor maths performance, both legacies of past political engineering, further fuel marginalization. Computational thinking is a new characterization of some specific procedural thinking, abstraction, problem solving and organizational skills that are finding their way from computer science programs into other fields. The paper describes our refocus of content in BingBee, a SET skill-building kiosk project targeting disadvantaged communities. As we shift to emphasize computational thinking more explicitly, we speculate that these skills could complement, and perhaps eventually displace, some elements of maths as the dominant driver of SET. The confluence of better tools, open service interfaces, and the rapid spread of handsets and devices into marginalized communities is an opportunity to build more widespread computational thinking skills. This could in turn facilitate a future Internet which is more inclusive, and in which users are able to create their own services.
This study characterizes the literature on teaching computational thinking (CT) to preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years. Previous research and published systematic studies have provided important contributions about CT teaching to elementary and high school children. However, to date, there is no systematic overview of CT education for preschoolers. For this reason, this systematic mapping synthesizes 82 studies on CT teaching, through the implementation and evaluation of tools and activities to teach, improve or measure the CT knowledge acquired by children. Furthermore, studies on courses or training offered to preschool teachers related to the teaching of CT were also considered. From the selected studies, the following information was collected: year of publication; recovery sources and databases; vehicles and places of publication; temporal delimitation of research, research approach, nature and research method; CT teaching approaches; tools used to teach CT and how they are classified according to their physical characteristics and, finally, participants and individuals responsible for the research. The results suggest an increase in the number of publications in recent years, revealing the interest of researchers in the topic. Furthermore, we observed a trend towards the use of physical artifacts and the use of the disconnected computing approach to teaching CT skills to preschool children. The results also exposed that preschool teachers have little autonomy in implementing CT teaching activities because those are mostly implemented by computer professionals (researchers, teachers, etc.). This is because preschool teachers are still discouraged from teaching computer and technology-related content to children, considering them complex and disconnected from basic curricula. However, when teachers are trained to teach CT, they become interested in the content and become more active during the teaching process. We argue for integrating CT-related content into education curricula and supporting preschool teachers to implement it autonomously in their classrooms.
Various aspects of computational thinking, which builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine, are discussed. Computational methods and models are helping to solve problems, design systems, and understand human behavior, by drawing on concepts fundamental to computer science (CS). Computational thinking (CT) is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex systems. CT is the way of thinking in terms of prevention, protection, and recovery from worst-case scenarios through redundancy, damage containment, and error correction. CT is using heuristic reasoning to discover a solution and using massive amount of data to speed up computation. CT is a futuristic vision to guide computer science educators, researchers, and practitioners to change society's image of the computer science field.
- C Thompson
Thompson, C. (2006). "Brain Teasers" Popular Mechanics 5(1): 50-51.
BingBee, an Information Kiosk for Social Enablement in Marginalized Communities, Proceedings 2006 conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on IT research in developing countries
- H Slay
- P Wentworth
- J Locke
Slay,H., Wentworth, P., Locke, J. BingBee, an Information Kiosk for Social Enablement in Marginalized
Communities, Proceedings 2006 conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and
information technologists on IT research in developing countries, SAICSIT Vol 204, pp. 111-120.
Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter, Riverhead Hardcover
- S Johnson
Johnson, S. (2005). Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making us
Smarter, Riverhead Hardcover. (See too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_For_You)