If Virtual Reality is about ‘being’ in a simulated place that doesn’t exist physically then Telepresence is about ‘being’ in a real place other than where you are physically. You could call them two sides of the same coin and the latter is going through just as much of a revolution as the former.

Witness the ‘Ad campaign [that] enables anyone to spend 3 minutes as a robot in Italy‘ –

It’s quite amazing to think a guy in New York can carry a bag for a random lady in Italy! “Could telepresence robots become a more common sight on our streets?”, asks Springwise. I really hope they do, but I can’t imagine myself being comfortable with hundreds of strangers eyeballing me as I trundle, virtually, down the street 😉

On a more serious note, one might wonder if we’re witnessing the birth of the disturbing future depicted in the Bruce Willis movie ‘Surrogates’ –

The wireless STEM motion tracking system from Sixense has been a massive success on Kickstarter, pushing well past $0.5m in recent days. The new video below gives an indication why, especially in the segment that includes the Oculus Rift where we can see the controlled  avatar literally looking around corners in the virtual environment –

I’m not sure what to make of the news that 5,000 Irish kids are to start the school year using Wriggle’s tablet-based digital curriculum.

“Parents or guardians of students purchase an iPad, or another tablet, for their child/children when such such schools get involved with Wriggle.

While this is up to the discretion of the school, some post-primary/secondary schools that have migrated to the Wriggle programme have reportedly liaised with families so that they can come up with an agreement with their local credit union in order to give families the option of paying for such tablets in installments.

Otherwise, the school may decree that a family will have to pay upfront for a tablet. Generally, however, Furlong said that the school community will be quite flexible and will work with parents /guardians. She said that often kids are buying tablets for their own use, anyway.”

Is this really what we want? In the current economic climate to be pressurizing parents into buying iPads for their children? And, from the wider perspective is this move away from the PC a good thing? How many workplaces do you know that are going tablet only?

We had a bigger than usual interest in the BT Young Scientists & Technology Exhibition this year due to the fact that we were collaborating with the team from Young Scientists Tanzania who proudly represented their country at the competition.

Unfortunately we couldn’t attend the event but lucky for us we had plenty of friends ‘pounding the pavement’, including Science & Maths teacher Paudie Scanlon who pointed us to one particularly wonderful project on game-based learning (GBL).

@missionvhq this kid is brilliant. Right up your street. Brilliant conclusions about effectiveness of gbl twitter.com/paud_ie/status…

— Paudie Scanlon (@paud_ie) January 12, 2013

 

Photo by Paudie Scanlon

Jeremy Rigney is a student at Banagher College, Coláiste Na Sionna, Banagher, Co. Offaly and kindly sent us the following details about his project –

“I built a game using Scratch to teach Prime and Composite numbers. I had two conditions (25 boys and girls in each), the GBL condition, which learned through my game, and the Traditional Classroom (TC), which learned as normal.

I administered pre and post test scores to determine the learning acquired.

What I found was that students in the GBL condition learned as much as the TC condition.

Not only that but I had allocated 25 minutes for both conditions to learn the topic and in the TC condition the students needed the full 25 minute time to learn the topic. However, in the GBL condition students only took 10 minutes to complete the game. They then spent the remainder of the time replaying the game to increase their score and to compete with friends to see who could get the higher score. So this shows that GBL has the potential to not only teach topics as efficiently, but to keep students more motivated.

Another interesting result that I found was in gender studies. In this case, girls out-preformed boys in the GBL condition and boys out-preformed girls in the TC condition. This could show that GBL is as effective for both conditions which could contradict previous research which said that Games and Computer Games are generally a male dominated domain.

My conclusion was that GBL could be an effective enhancement to the traditional classroom setting. I think that students could be introduced to the topic via the traditional classroom setting and then reinforced through GBL, or vice versa.”

Fascinating stuff from Jeremy. Congratulations to him and his team on a brilliant project.

By the way, Jeremy was also selected from 550 young scientists for 1 of the 30 places at BT Business Bootcamp at UCD. Keep an eye on this guy!

As we mentioned in the previous post we’ve been working recently with NUIM and the Young Scientist Tanzania project. Well, it was an absolute delight on Tuesday to finally meet the Kibosho girls in Maynooth.

Kibosho girls with James from MissionV and Angela from NUIM

With a hectic schedule for the week they were on a whirlwind tour through the University and only had an hour to spend on MissionV training. But we were amazed and delighted by what they achieved in that time, developing a wonderful model of the coffee plantation at the foothills of Kilimanjaro where the project was based –

Coffee Plantation modelled in MissionV (with school and Kilimanjaro in background)

Indeed it was even more impressive to watch the girls narrate a screencast, with no scripting or rehearsal, demonstrating how MissionV could be used to illustrate their work –

That was on Tuesday. On Wednesday evening I was sitting down to my tea, watching the RTE News, when the first item on the BT Young Scientists & Technology Exhibition segment was….  all about the Kibosho girls!! And again they spoke so well about their project and what it is to be a scientist.

I can’t say how proud we were of them and how honoured we’ve been to be a small part of this project. And I’d like to pay special tribute to our collaborators at NUIM – Angela Rickard, Joe Clowry and Brendan Doggett. It was an absolute pleasure to work with them.

Following discussions we held earlier this year with the Education Department NUI Maynooth we developed a new initiative in collaboration with Angela Rickard, who lectures on Ed Tech in that department. Angela wanted to introduce her students to creative, alternative ways to teach and learn science and to integrate development education themes into the Science Education undergraduate program. Working together we developed a project entitled NOW: Navigating Other Worlds (for which Angela was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the university). The project used the MissionV platform where students working in teams created a number of resources based on the Junior Cycle Science syllabus. Meanwhile we also linked in with the Young Scientist Tanzania project (going on in Tanzanian schools through the work of the CDPC in Maynooth).

The NOW project offered a route into Game-based Learning for BScEd students that links it with students overseas and added a particularly interesting dimension that valued the voices from the African schools and disseminated the really interesting work they’re doing. A delegation of Tanzania students and teachers will visit Maynooth in January when as part of the prize for winning YST they will exhibit their project (including a MissionV 3d representation of it) at the BT Young Scientis exhibition in the RDS.

Naturally we were delighted to participate and over the last few weeks Angela’s students have been developing really wonderful learning resources on MissionV. Nine (three member) teams each took a different approach and the Probability Playground is just one example of their amazing work –

It’s great to hear the students comment at the end that their work has given them a more positive outlook on game based learning.

MissionV’s Margaret Keane has written a new guest article for the TeachNet Blog entitled, “Should Coding be made Compulsory in Irish Schools?“

“So am I saying it should be compulsory? Compulsory suggests shackles, a standalone subject that is ring fenced; an approach which has plagued the development of IT in education in Ireland. Coding and indeed technology when used in a teaching context should be fully integrated and embedded into the curriculum. In other words it’s not enough learning to programme for programming sake, it should be more about programming to learn, using coding skills to explore new ways of learning across a variety of subjects. Learning is so much more powerful when it has relevance, purpose and context.”

Read the full article here.

We’ve launched our campaign to raise the funds to run the MissionV programme in 38 schools from November 2012 to June 2013. Please help spread the word and/or make a pledge if you can, on our Fundit page.

Courtesy of: Online Schools

Our two favourite events of the conferencing calendar are the CESI and ICT in Education events. So it’s great to hear from Pamela O’Brien, co-organizer of the latter,  that they are going to start extending the reach of the conference past May with a couple of interesting new initiatives.

The first of those is a set of workshops to be held in Thurles on Saturday 22nd of September in the area of social media. These will be delivered by Nick Jackson and Abhay Adhikari  and will allow attendees to investigate essential digital communication skills and create an online digital toolkit.

More details and registration here. Highly recommended.