Ciepłuch, Justyna and Ciepłuch, Błażej and Jacob, Ricky and Mooney, Peter
(2011)
”Hide and Tweet”: A game to teach schoolchildren about spatial technologies.
In:
ICEP 2011: International Conference on Engaging Pedagogies.
Griffith College, Dublin, pp. 1-8.
ISBN 978-1-906878-03-0
Abstract
As part of the Geotechnology research team at NUI Maynooth we were involved in the preparation
and running of various activities in the Summer School on Computer Science for school children aged between
12 to 18 years old. Since year 2009 we have been constantly developing, testing, and deploying some geospatial
software applications which were used by the children for activities in the summer school programme. The high
level goal of this development was to help school children become more familiar GPS devices and computerbased
Location-based services (LBS) technologies which are now playing such a crucial role in today’s Internet
connected society. The software applications were used as part of games and tasks for the children. In our paper
we shall describe how these games have evolve during these years, the educational aspects and benefits of the
game and how both the software components and devices were developed. Overall, children participating in the
summerschool provided their comments in the form of a survey. They felt that there were now more aware about
possibilities in geoinformatics available with “ordinary off the shelf devices”. Different issues related with webbased
maps (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, etc) were introduced and we explained the differences
between them. Most importantly in case of geo-technologies we felt that the activities helped the children become
aware that that computing and positioning happens everywhere and is not tied with the desk and the desktop
computer.We summarise our experiences gained in these last three years and discuss the educational gains of this
type of game-based approach to location-based technologies to schoolchildren. All of our software is developed
using free and open-source components meaning that it can be deployed by any school or educational facility with
minimum cost. A smartphone-based version of the software has also been developed.
| Item Type: |
Book Section
|
| Keywords: |
spatial technologies; computer science teaching; school children; Geotechnology research; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science |
| Item ID: |
4988 |
| Depositing User: |
CS Editor
|
| Date Deposited: |
29 May 2014 11:37 |
| Publisher: |
Griffith College, Dublin |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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