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Fear of a decline in American democracy has focused a national conversation on the role civics education should play to create a more knowledgeable, empathetic, empowered citizenry. I designed and taught an eight hour, once-a-week civics and U.S. history curriculum primarily utilizing simulations and experiential education to 159 fourth grade students from three different Bay Area elementary schools. I use observational, survey self-report, and interview data to examine to what extent students participating in American historical simulations increase their empathy and empowerment, with reflections on my own experience as their teacher. Lesson topics included redlining, Japanese Incarceration camps, confirmation bias, and inequality built into the Constitution. Despite outliers and insufficient quantitative evidence, data from surveys, interviews, and observations support findings that students enacting emotionally engaging simulations in which they were given active roles and agency were successful in increasing greater levels of empathy for each other and for people affected by discriminatory policies discussed through those activities. They improved their knowledge of the government and confidence in their abilities to make a difference in the government and their communities through protests and other political actions. As a teacher, I became aware of my biases to design activities for students with personalities similar to my own and learned that I must find a balance between lectures and experiential simulations in my future classrooms. Overall, this research supports utilizing experiential learning simulations to increase empathy and belief in students’ abilities to positively change their world.

Since its first detection in Catalonia in 2012, Vespa velutina has expanded rapidly throughout this territory, and it looks like it is going to continue to do so, since except for some Pyrenean areas, the environment is in favor of it. The expansion of this species has a series of associated impacts, the most serious being on the beekeeping sector, since they feed heavily on Apis mellifera. In addition, there are several agents that are directly related to the management of this species, and that have not always matched their vision. This situation has made it difficult to reach certain agreements, so, to this day, there is no management strategy at the Catalonian level that has been jointly developed by all the stakeholders. Because of this, the actions that have been taken have often been only coordinated at the regional level, losing effectiveness. In order to encourage cooperation among the mentioned agents, a role-playing game has been developed based on the issue of Vespa velutina in Catalonia. This game presents the current situation of Vespa velutina in our territory and the players’ objective is to minimize the impacts of this species by proposing different management measures. Once finished, representatives of the different agents have been summoned to put the game into practice, and they have been asked for their opinion to continue improving the game. In addition, the measures that they have proposed have been analyzed and a characterization of each of the roles they have played has been made. The proposals that have been obtained from the implementation of the game, in addition to others that can be found through bibliography, could serve as the basis for developing a proposal for the management of Vespa velutina in Catalonia considering all the most relevant points of view

Esta experiencia educativa describe la utilización de estrategias de aprendizaje cooperativo en taller vertical para solventar algunos de los problemas detectados en la docencia de las asignaturas de Proyectos Arquitectónicos para abordar programas complejos emergentes de hábitat colectivo. El problema principal consiste en la carencia de “puentes conceptuales” entre los distintos programas académicos que a menudo limitan las posibilidades de intercambio entre ellos. Experiencias previas, que sincronizaban la docencia de asignaturas de distintos niveles, mostraron las virtudes de este tipo de estrategias para incentivar el aprendizaje entre alumnos pero desvelaron dificultades para su desarrollo dentro de la estructura horizontal actual de la docencia en Europa. El proceso de innovación docente aquí descrito muestra cómo la introducción del “juego de roles” permite atenuar ciertos problemas del trabajo en equipo del taller vertical, acelerando la toma de decisiones y mejorando los resultados. This educational experience describes the use of cooperative learning strategies in a vertical workshop to solve some of the problems detected in the teaching of Architectural Projects subjects to address complex emerging programs of collective habitat. The main problem is found in the lack of “conceptual bridges" between the different academic programs that often limit the possibilities of exchange between them. Previous teaching experiences, synchronizing different levels of subjects, showed the strengths of this kind of strategies to encourage learning among students but revealed difficulties for development within the current horizontal structure of teaching in Europe. The teaching innovation experience described shows how the introduction of “role play” allows mitigating certain issues of teamwork in vertical workshops, speeding up decision-making and improving results. Esta experiencia ha sido financiada por el programa de Proyectos de Innovación Educativa de la Universidad de Málaga (Vicerrectorado de PDI, convocatoria 2019-2021), con el Código PIE 19- 202, denominado “Taller Vertical Cooperativo para una Ciudad Saludable: Aprendizaje del proyecto arquitectónico de programas emergentes mediante el juego de roles en transversalidad vertical”.

M.Ed. (Science Education) The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of simulations in supporting grade 10 learners from under-performing Dinaledi schools in Soweto in eliminating their misconceptions on simple electric circuits. A quasi experimental design was used in this study and 130 participants from three Dinaledi schools in Soweto formed the sample. This study commenced by exploring and identifying the misconceptions by using a validated three-tier multiple choice diagnostic questionnaire. This diagnostic questionnaire was administered as a pre-test, to identify the misconceptions. Once the misconceptions were identified, the researcher developed an intervention strategy that included the use of PhET simulations. After completing the section on electric circuits, the same diagnostic questionnaire was employed in a post-test in order to establish if the intervention was effective in promoting conceptual change in order to reduce and eventually eliminate the misconceptions. The data was captured and SPSS version 22 was used to perform descriptive statistics in order to answer the three research questions. The results from the study were compared to results from studies conducted in Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Turkey and the USA (Engelhardt & Beichner, 2004; Peşman & Eryilmaz, 2010; Taşlidere, 2013; Kapartzianis & Kriek, 2014). The findings indicated that the use of simulations as an intervention is effective in decreasing the learners’ misconceptions in the field of simple electric circuits.

M.Cur. Please refer to full text to view abstract

M.Ed. (Subject Didactics) The focus in this study is on roleplay as a technique for second language education, wi the specific reference to oral communication. The field study as well as the theoretical framework is placed against the background of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) as language education approach or; The theoretical research encompasses role-play as Anthropological phenomenon and especially also as a didactic principle. This framework is complemented by a brief exposition of LT as language education paradigm. The field work is based on qualitative observation. The researcher had participant observation st.atus at a school for a month. A multi-faceted analysis of two oral communication lessons were made. The qualitative observation is triangulated with structured interviews (questionnaire type), open-ended interviews, document analysis as well as structured systematic analysis of two recorded lessons. It was found that there was a significant difference in interpersonal social language usage in the two lessons. The lessons in which role-play was implemented as a technique showed a qualitative increase in language production. It is to be concluded that role-play accommodates oral communication in second language context meaningfully as a mode of pedagogic discourse, supported by a simulated naturalistic milieu.

The school gamification environment is a matter that is currently on the public eye of many personal on education. Currently there are many technological alternatives to implement gamification concepts within a school. This document describes the implementation of a software platform to perform school gamification through different technological solutions such as a mobile application and an administration dashboard. The project presented below shows the work done for the design and implementation of this platform from an architectural point of view. Technical designs will be displayed as the final result of both the applications such as the environment and the methodology that has been implemented in order to develop this platform. The project has been approached from the perspective of a software architect, not from the point of view of a developer, since we defined a series of methodologies and best practices for the future developers of the platform. We paid more attention to architectural designs and not on development and implementation of the various components that compose the architecture. One aspect that will be displayed in the document are the settings and quality indicators implemented in all the control points of development to ensure a minimum level of quality in the final result. The entire project has been developed using open source technologies and the project has been public distributed under the Apache 2 license. All work can be found in public repositories of code that can be seen in this document. One of the methods of development and distribution that has been implemented in this project allows developers to contribute to the project easily and their contributions will be published in the servers automatically. The techniques used to meet this requirement is the continuous integration and continuous delivery. All the software components, both applications and the service oriented architecture have been made with HTML5 technologies that are the actual references in the world of the developer community.

En este trabajo, diseñado desde el Grupo de Innovación Docente en Materiales (GIDMat-RIMA, https://www.upc.edu/rima/grups/gidmat), se plantea una experiencia en la que, claramente, el rol principal recae en el estu diantado, como protagonista de su propio proceso de aprendizaje mientras que el profesorado adopta un rol secundario desde una posición de guía-coach. Así, el estudiantado, en grupos, se constituye en «empresas júnior de asesoría en el ámbito de materiales», dando respuesta a los requerimientos y consultas planteados por los «clientes» (profesorado). Se establece un calendario de consultas durante el curso y se inicia una relación de consulta-respuesta, vía e-mail, en la que el profesorado recibe los «informes» presentados por los grupos-empresa y da una doble respuesta, tanto como «cliente», como desde la vertiente académica (feed-back).