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Future Culture Adventure (FCA): A Language and Culture Learning Program in Virtual Reality |
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by Hannah Cho, Lin Hur, Hiroshi Sasaki |
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Future Culture Adventure (FCA) is designed to help adult learners develop second language skills and experience foreign cultures in an interactive and authentic learning environment in a 3D virtual world, the Second Life. FCA allows learners to engage with cultural environment as well as other native speakers from all around the world. The learners will watch videos about cultures, situate themselves in authentic settings and interact with other participants. FCA is a situated community of practice for language and culture learners living in the Global Village. |
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CAIA: A College Advising Intelligent Agent |
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by Douglas Gilbert, Sara Petry |
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CAIA is designed to provide college advising resources to low-income high school students in an easy-to-use, effective, and personalized learning environment. The interface of CAIA addresses the short-comings of current sources of college information by (1) providing personalized, relevant information and (2) engaging students through a high degree of interactivity. User testing has shown that CAIA is a more effective learning environment for college counseling than current resources, including websites and books. Based on a literature review and input from our target learners, the content of our system currently focuses on financial issues. |
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NutriChef: The Healthy Cooking Wii Simulation Game |
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by Claudia Jimenez, Dana Nelson |
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NutriChef: The Healthy Cooking Wii Simulation is an interactive flash game and website that provides kids with a fun, accessible way to learn about cooking and nutrition. By having kids virtually prepare and plan nutritionally balanced meals in a game setting, NutriChef both engages and educates kids. The website serves as the link between the game and real-life by providing the recipes played in the game and a way for kids to share their cooking experiences. Ultimately, NutriChef aims to motivate kids to become healthier eaters by promoting awareness of the way foods are prepared and nutrition balanced. |
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Supporting Different Learning Styles in Education |
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by Jaime Koh |
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Despite acknowledgment of individual differences among students and the emerging theory of multiple intelligences, many schools find it challenging to cater to the different types of learners in the classroom when conducting lessons and implementing technologies. Rather than taking a “one size fits all” approach, the proposed online learning environment aims to address this issue by delivering content customized for student-centered learning; this is done by offering different pathways for students to learn the same concepts after taking into account their individual learning styles. It is envisioned that this learning environment can be implemented as a 1:1 solution in the classroom. |
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Banking 101: Towards Financial Empowerment of India's Poor |
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by Neha Kumar |
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Banking 101 aims to address the problem of financial illiteracy in the rural and semi-urban parts of India where the population is largely illiterate, by adopting a culture-specific approach that involves minimal dependence on text. The platform proposed is the mobile platform, motivated by the high penetration that mobile phones have among the poor. The finished product - a mobile educational application - will introduce basics of banking to adults and encourage them to pursue the options available to them in their locale. |
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Technology and the City: The High and Low of Technology for Mathematics Education |
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by Evelyn Kung, Annie Lien, Scott Ullman |
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The hype surrounding personal computers, consumer electronics, and multimedia software has encouraged educational-content developers to push the edges of technology in their products and presentations. However, with some American schools lacking the resources to implement these high-tech teaching tools, it may make more sense to take a “less is more” approach to educational technology, focusing instead on solid pedagogy and low-cost solutions. For comparison, we demonstrate an elementary mathematics lesson implemented using two drastically different types of technology (3D animation and self-made manipulatives) to offer differently funded schools the ability to present the same content to their students. |
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StepOne: An Interactive Healthy Lifestyle Learning Platform for Middle School Kids |
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by Michiko Lynn Powers, Junko Tanaka |
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StepOne is an interactive learning platform for middle school kids that uses a self-monitoring device (wrist band) to measure work-out levels and eating habits and then passes the data to an on-line educational space where participants engage in learning activities. Each participant gets rewarded for off-line activity and for on-line learning achievements. StepOne’s objectives are: 1) to help each participant gain more knowledge regarding the benefits of physical activity and nutrition; and 2) to help each participant realize positive behavioral changes by applying their acquired knowledge to their own real-life decision-making processes. |
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Kiva School to School: Microfinance Lending Groups as Learning Communities |
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by Jim Ratcliffe |
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Kiva School to School is a series of data visualization tools used to support the education community on the popular peer-to-peer microfinance lending site kiva.org. Microfinance lending groups are powerful agents of social change— I wanted to explore the question of how they can function as learning communities. A key part of this project uses live data to create mashups that provide more context for school-based Kiva lending. Working with over 160 school-based lending groups and data from 2,000 Kiva entrepreneurs, Kiva School to School provides tools that help school-based groups evaluate lending opportunities, identify trends in development data for host countries, and use this information as an opportunity to learn |
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School-To-Go: Adaptive Teaching Aids for Informal Learning Contexts |
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by Olga Trusova |
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School-To-Go offers adaptive meta-aids that help volunteers select a context aware and location specific set of lesson plans, tools, and resources for teaching highly vulnerable, yet motivated youth residing in transitional housing at various locations. The program is based on methods for building design & entrepreneurial literacies along with technical fluencies through design-centered lesson plans, the use of computer clusters, and engagement of youth in venture-like projects in order to develop "life skills” needed for their success in schools, peer networks, and later on in work settings. |
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HomeFun: The Online Interactive Homework Platform Supporting Learning through Play |
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by Nesra Yannier |
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It has been argued that educational games have a great potential to make learning more fun, and engaging for students, while encouraging deeper thinking and complex problem solving. Yet, integrating these games into the school experience is still a challenge. HomeFun is an online, interactive homework platform which allows teachers to incorporate content-rich games into their curriculum, assign them as homework to the students, and track students’ progress online. With HomeFun, students can see how they compare to their classmates and communicate with others during their learning experiences |
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