Abstract

The development of programming skills is currently promoting from an early school age, trying to get children to take an active and creative role in the use of technologies. The objective of this article is to verify the repercussion of educational robotics activities on kindergarten students in the acquisition of computational thinking and programming skills. The research design is quasi-experimental, with pre-test and post-test measures, using experimental and control groups. The sample consists of 131 students from the second cycle of early education (between 3 and 6 years old), all from the same Spanish school. Computational thinking is measured through three dimensions: sequences (algorithms), action-instruction correspondence and debugging. The intervention sessions, as well as the structure of the challenges that were used in the pre- and post-test evaluations, were designed based on the reference program of robotics studies called “TangibleK”. The intervention, carried out doing learning activities using educational robotics resources, presents positive results in relation to the computational thinking skills achieved. The differences between the pre-test and the post-test in the experimental and control groups are statistically significant, in that children engaged in robotics program achieves a greater advance in the three dimensions of computational competence through this method.

Abstract

International audience; This paper explores the introduction of mobile technologies in a particular serious games subset called learning games. We focus on two main purposes where mobility turns out to be useful: situated learning and collaborative learning. The article outlines the opportunities and the remaining challenges for these learning situations. Some important issues are highlighted for immerging learners in real context. We also propose some scenarios to illustrate the benefits of mobile devices in classroom situations. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The journalism being taught at universities in Spain is undergoing intensive changes as a result of the dual pressure exerted by the impact of digitisation in two specific aspects. The first is the journalistic system itself (business models, professional routines, information consumption, etc.). The second aspect involves the teaching guidelines established as a result of the implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Focusing on the latter issue, the current debate regarding the orientation of journalistic education is calling for this aspect not to be relegated or limited to training in technical skills, which are constantly being renewed by technological developments of the digital environment. On the contrary, journalism education must also take into account other skills that foster the achievement of critical thinking, which is fundamental for the exercise of the journalistic profession. However, in the face of an increasingly digitised, competitive labour market, journalism studies and their training programmes also have a duty to provide the skills and competencies demanded by this market. In this paper, we have conducted a systematic review of some of the experiences of innovative teaching that have been successfully carried out in Journalism degrees taught in Spain for this purpose (service-learning, project-based learning, content curation, and edublogs, among others). These experiences reflect the involvement of university professors in providing comprehensive education for future journalists, with a strong emphasis on the intensive use of the digital resources currently available.