Scratch Day is made up of a global network of events. Its main goal is to bring people together to celebrate Scratch. Scratch is a free encryption platform that can be used online and offline for children. Scratch Day events bring together young people from the Scratch community. During these meetings, attendees share projects, learn from each other and welcome newcomers. Robotics and computational thinking are ideal tools for developing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pedagogy. Currently, innovation and motivation of students during the learning process are promoted by educational robotics tools. Robots are increasingly integrated into our society. To such an extent that robots are becoming more and more common in our everyday environment. This paper presents a workshop which is focused on two main objectives. The first one is to celebrate Scratch Day promoting Scratch locally. On the other hand, this event is aimed to present a robotic educational tool for people as the first step to get into robotics world. This workshop is aimed on those adults who want to discover what possibilities Scratch brings in the introduction to robotics. Throughout this workshop an initiation to Scratch is developed in the context of educational robotics. As the most significant results throughout the workshop, it is clearly demonstrated that Scratch is an ideal tool for children and adults with no previous programming or robotic experience to begin learning both through hands-on experiences. Throughout this work the importance of combining theory and practice is shown in order to include fun tasks intertwined with the challenges of applying theory to problem solving.

Scratch day to introduce robotics

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [Chacon R, Posada H, Toledo A, Gouveia M. Development of IoT applications in civil engineering classrooms using mobile devices. Comput Appl Eng Educ. 2018;26:1769–1781. https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.21985], which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.21985. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving

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Development of IoT applications in civil engineering classrooms using mobile devices

We present an activity framed within the European Robotics Week event. Robotics and computational practice are ideal tools for developing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pedagogy. A modular and adaptive hands‐on workshop is described in detail. The workshop is based on multiplatform educational robotics content as a first step into the robotics world. Three educational tools are used to introduce examples of robotics applications. The operational details, materials, and examples of activities for selected modules are presented with the expectation that all teachers can adapt these activities to their classes. Despite the small number of students, the experience delivered results that might be useful for other instructors to promote workshops with similar or identical content to generate further benefits. This study demonstrates that it is important to combine theory and practice and include fun tasks that intertwine the challenges of applying theory to problem solving. Furthermore, the results show how the same content can be deployed using three different robotics education tools.

European Robotics Week to introduce robotics and promote engineering

This quantitative research aims to analyze the impact of the WampServer application in Blended learning during the educational process of computing through data science, machine learning, and neura...

Impact of the WampServer application in Blended learning considering data science, machine learning, and neural networks:

The importance of web development education is increasingly gaining attention. However, the teaching of web development has a relatively undeveloped pedagogy. In this paper we propose a top-down approach to teaching app development. The proposed approach comprises three phases: preparation phase, web technology tutorial phase, and capstone project phase. The preparation phase requires instructor to select a sample web application, to extract the technological components of this application, and to select core technical topics for the tutorials. The tutorial phase consists of a series of lectures and hands-on tasks that help students learn web technologies used for implementing the sample application, with a focus on how disparate technologies were integrated and related to each other. The capstone project phase requires instructor to group students into teams to implement their own web applications. We present our web development course to exemplify the implementation of the proposed approach, which provides rich implications to both practitioners and researchers of web development education. We also discuss the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach within the landscape of previous studies and learning theories.

A Top-Down Approach to Teaching Web Development in the Cloud

This work presents our experience on Android teaching at Miguel Hernandez University (Elche, Spain). We decided to orientate our courses toward Android app development, and encouraged students to carry their Android phones or tablets to the classroom. The results, in terms of student motivation, satisfaction and engagement in programming have been extraordinary.

M. Mar Galotto

Papers

Improving student engagement on programming using app development with Android devices