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Coordinator: Prof. Dimitris Alimisis, ASPETE/GREECE

ASPETE :School of Pedagogical and Technological Education
http:// www.aspete.gr
General Department of Education, Branch of Patras
 
Prof. Dimitris Alimisis
alimisis@otenet.gr
 
Type of institution: The School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (A.S.PE.T.E.) is located in Athens, Greece. It is a self-administered public legal entity. The School comprises the following Departments: Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electronic Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, General Department of Education and General Department of General Courses. The permanent teaching staffs include 60 members (23 working at the General Education Department). The School's mission includes the provision of concurrent pedagogical and technological education to its students (about 2000), the promotion of applied research in educational technology and pedagogy, and the provision of pedagogical training, further training or specialization.

Expertise and experience: The coordinator (Ph. D. in Science Education) is the head of the Lab of Educational Technology of ASPETE in Patras and has been involved in teaching and research in the field of educational technology at the level of teacher education during the last 10 years including teacher training in the constructivist use of ICT and in innovative practices concerning pedagogic use of ICT in Science and Technology Education. Our Lab in general has a long experience in training student-teachers in educational technology and in pedagogical applications of ICT, especially in the areas of science and technology. The content of our courses and our training culture is inspired from the cognitive theories of learning (Piaget), the discovery model (Bruner) and the constructivism-constructionism (Papert). The educational philosophy of the courses is based on the premise that the use of technology as a teaching and learning tool presupposes the appropriate pedagogical teacher's intervention and the appropriate hardware and software that can transform technology to a valuable tool for learning and for student's intellectual development.
Our expertise include the use of educational software (such as concept mapping tools, modelling tools, exploratory and interactive simulations, Logo-based environments) in practical ways during our training courses intending to help student-teachers to adopt the incorporation of these technological tools in their teaching repertoire aiming at a change from traditional teacher-centred methods of instruction to constructivist ones. We have also a long experience in using the internet-based communication for educational purposes. Our face to face courses are supported by on-line training materials and an e-class community offering asynchronous communication tools allowing students to practice from their own private place and at a time convenient for them. The Lab of Educational Technology of ASPETE in Patras has recently developed various robotic educational projects at regional and national level with teachers and students from secondary technical schools. Research papers presenting our recent work in robotics have been presented in national (i.e. http://korinthos.uop.gr/~didinf05/) and international conferences (i.e. http://eurologo2005.oeiizk.waw.pl/PDF/E2005AlimisisEtAl.pdf).

The coordinator has been officially accredited in Greece as educator of teachers and trainers in the field of adult education, member of the Hellenic Organization of Information and Communication Technology in Education, the Hellenic Union of Science Education, the Hellenic Union of Adult Education and the Eurologo Conference Scientific Committee. He has served as promoter of the Socrates Programme in Greece, coordinator of the Socrates project "Aristotle-Galilei-Newton" (1996-97), as partner in the Comenius 2.1 project "Cheminc" (2000-2003), and has participated in the European Programmes Arion study visits (1995) and Grundtvig (2004). He has presented research papers in many national and international conferences focused on the constructivist use of educational technology, especially on ICT and robotics in education.

Specific tasks: ASPETE as coordinator will offer project organisation and planning, communication plan, financial management, contractual management organisation and preparation of meetings (agenda, proposals for action plans, financing matters, minutes etc) and will establish structure of support /defining roles in project. ASPETE will coordinate the activities that will be developed in this project indicated on the workplan and will contribute in cooperation with the other partners to the design of robotics-based methodology for student learning, to the designe of training curriculum, to the development of robotics-based training activities and materials, to the implementation and evaluation of the training courses and to the dissemination of the project outcomes.

Role within the national education system : The diploma issued by the Departments of A.S.PE.T.E. is publicly recognised and qualifies its holders for teaching in the corresponding discipline in secondary education. The School also implements courses of up to two semesters' duration that are supplementary to those run by its Departments: courses of pedagogical training intended for qualified or prospective teachers and courses of further training or specialization intended for qualified teachers or non. Student-teachers that have successfully completed the courses are awarded a Certificate of Pedagogical and Teaching Competence, in the case of the pedagogical training courses, and a Certificate of Further Training or Specialization, in the case of the further training or specialization courses. One-year courses of pedagogical training are implemented in Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Volos, Ioannina, and Heraklion-Crete, whereas courses of specialization are implemented in Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras.

IUFM :Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres d'Aix-Marseille
http://www.aix-mrs.iufm.fr
Marseille, France
 
Prof. ENJOLRAS Gerard :Charge de Mission relations internationals
g.enjolras@aix-mrs.iufm.fr
 

Type and legal status: Created on September 1, 1991 the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres de l'Academie d'Aix Marseille is a higher educational establishment, instituted by the law of orientation on the education of July 10, 1989, to reorganize the entire teacher training.
Location: IUFM Aix-Marseille is established in Marseille (the Administration and two training places, Marseille Chateau-Gombert and Marseille-Canebiere), Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Digne-les-Bains. IUFM cooperates with the four regional universities (Universite de Provence, Universite de la Mediterranee, Universite Paul Cezanne, Universite d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse).

Composition of students population: IUFM Aix-Marseille is in charge of the training elementary school (550 jobs for this region each year) and for 40 different subjects for secondary school (approximately, 2 000 students). In second years, we have 550 trainees for elementary school and 750 trainees for secondary school within the same 40 different subjects.

Main areas and types of activity: IUFM Aix-Marseille is composed by seven Departments ( DFR Education Physique et Sportives, DFR Enseignements Techniques et Technologiques, DFR Ingenierie et Sciences de l'Education, DFR Langues Vivantes Etrangeres, DFR Sciences Fondamentales et Appliquees, DFR Sciences de l'Homme et de la Societe, DFR Textes, Langages et Communication ). IUFM Aix-Marseille is in charge of the training for elementary school and for 40 secondary school subjects. IUFM is also in charge of the in-service teacher training. Research in education takes a great importance in the IUFM and the institute has in many collaborations in various international programs as expert or training organizer.

Expertise and experience:
A large range of experts in education are members of the IUFM and we cover a large expertise in education, being able to develop and provide a solid expertise. We can mention here:

  • investigation in education (specifically in technology education for this project)
  • curricula and recourses development
  • initial training of future teachers
  • in-service training
  • training courses on demand, re-conversion courses and other special training
  • international projects
  • open and distance courses
  • publishing of scientific works and books, other types of typified documents, etc.

Specific tasks in this project: in accordance to the plan established and agreed with the partners, the IUFM will be involved in all main activities of the project, meaning:

  • selecting and organizing a repertoire of appropriate computer-based robotic activities and producing a set of critical examples that can be used in a constructivist way by teachers at secondary school level in the areas of science and technology
  • developing and implementing training courses for teachers choosing appropriate activities and strategies designed to help and encourage them to adopt these new pedagogical methods
  • evaluating the courses and reporting experiences from the implementation of the courses in France;
  • creating a community of practice between educators and teachers for a continuous and sustainable professional development in using computer-based robotic tools through the integration of e-learning tools and supporting the development of a repository web site to make all the developed materials easily accessible for teachers and trainers.
  • disseminating the results of the project to the broader educational community

Role within the national education system: Students come at IUFM to become teachers. There is one IUFM for each region of France. IUFM Aix-Marseille is the IUFM of the region of Province (from Alps to Mediterranean coast). The IUFM are a privileged place of research on and for the School, with the crossing of university research and the innovating practices, they cause and accompany, by their action, the education system evolutions.

DEI:Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione - Universita di Padova
www.dei.unipd.it
Padova Italy

Assistant Professor Michele Moro -Department of Information Engineering - University of Padova
mike@dei.unipd.it
 

Type of institution: The Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, DEI, is a 8000 m2 department divided in three buildings in which are working 88 professors and assistant professors; more than 110 Ph.D. students and research collaborators; 33 administrative and technical units, and a number of visiting researchers from all over the world. The Research areas active at DEI include: AI and Robotics, Applied Computational Theory, Applied Control System Theory, Automation, Bioengineering, DBMS and IMS, Electronics (Micro, Industrial, Laser and Quantum), Electronic Measurements, Multimedia Tech., Musical Informatics, Natural Language Processing, Real-time Systems, Signal and Image Processing, Telecommunication. The DEI hosts 41 research laboratories and an Excellence Center for Parallel Processing. The scientific results generated in 1997-2002 are a total amount of 580 international journal papers and 862 international conference papers. This resulted in several awards: first place at the IBM Faculty Award; first, second and third award at Start Cup (Italian competition for innovative industrial business idea), first place at the Regione Veneto Award for best applicative scientific publication and for the best university-industry project. In the years 2002/2003, DEI got 67 research contracts and several European projects, for a total amount of 6 million Euro. The Department is committed to a strong scientific divulgation activity. Some of the activities are: Department Colloquia (Weekly Seminars held by DEI Researchers), Guest Seminars, Distinguished Lectures (Lectures held by International Experts in the main areas of Information Engineering), Open Day (in which the DEI laboratories are open to the industry). Since 8/7/2004 the Department is certified according to the Quality Standard UNI-ISO-EN 9001:2000 for the activities of "Design and implementation of research activities and training for the research. Support services for the research and the didactics".

Expertise: The DEI unit includes people with expertise in teaching and doing research in the areas of:

  • robotics,
  • real-time systems,
  • programming languages,
  • information management and multimedia technologies to supporting modern training systems.

Two laboratories of the DEI unit will be interested: the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab and Real-time Systems Lab. People involved have experience in undergraduate teaching, in preparing distinguish lectures and seminars on subjects related to the present proposal. Moreover, they organized (together with AGFOL scarl, an agency for professional and continuous training) postgraduate master courses in industrial informatics and real-time systems funded by the European Community via the FSE program. They are developing a programming environment based on the LOGO language and a set of demo contexts exploiting its effective approach. They have experiences in using LEGO Mindstorms and other simple robotic architectures in didactics activity both at the undergraduate and at the high-school level. Several final project realized by undergraduate students exploited the didactics capabilities of such robotics platforms. Related interesting activities of the DEI unit are also:
  • The participation to the Symposium and the soccer competition of the RoboCup, in addition to the affiliation to the International Robocup Federation, an initiative promoting the involvement of young pupil/students in the fields of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.
  • The organization RoboCup Symposium & Competition in Padua - Italy in 2003;
  • The designing and realizing of a teleteaching multimedia system based on open source software and open standards to be distributed through public networks and Internet protocols.

Specific tasks : The contributions that the DEI unit can offer are the following:

  • The identification of didactic robotics experiences and the production of documentation suitable to guide teachers in delivering such experiences to help students in learning various disciplines (physics, maths, geometry, informatics).
  • The collaboration in the definition, realization and utilization of didactic materials, with special attention for the use of advanced ICT technologies and for their dissemination.
  • The analysis and study of the didactic methodogical aspects in applying the constructivist and constructionist approaches to robotics as a new learning tool.
  • The involving of external didactic institutions in Italy during the validation phase of the results of the research.

Role within the national education system : Part of our graduate engineer students become teachers in the national public school system, most of them in technical professional secondary schools and teaching information technology subjects .

UP-RO :UNIVERSITY OF PITESTI
http:// www.upit.ro and www.die.ro
Pitesti

Director Georgeta CHIRLESAN - Department for International Relations and European Integration
gchir@xnet.ro

Type and legal status: State university, recognised and accredited higher education institution. Location: The University is located in Pitesti, a medium size city, placed at 120 km far from Bucharest - the capital of Romania - to the north-west direction.
Composition of school population: Relevant for the project is the target group composed by the students performing their studies in sciences, meaning the students from the Faculty of Sciences ("Chemistry and Physics" and "Physics Engineering" specialisation's).
Main areas and types of activity: University of Pitesti has around 17,000 students and approximately 800 teaching and administrative staff. It gathers under its co-ordination and management 10 faculties offering Bachelor diploma, Master diploma and Doctor diploma (Faculty of Sciences; Faculty of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Letters, Faculty of Mechanics and Technology, Faculty of Electronics and Electro-Mechanics, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, Faculty of Economics, Law and Administrative Sciences, Faculty of Physical Education and Sports, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Socio-Humanistic Sciences).
In addition to these, University of Pitesti has also several specialised departments, such as: Department for International Relations and European Integration, "Muntenia" Training Centre, Department of the Didactic Staff Training, Education's Quality Assurance Department, Publishing House, University Library, Open and Distance Learning Department, etc..
The areas in which University of Pitesti develops its activity are strongly linked with the fact that it is a higher education institution, thus most of its activities focus on education and training. So, we can emphasize here the principal areas of activity in which University of Pitesti acts: education and training; scientific research; application research; guidance and counselling; professional orientation; international co-operation in different fields; publishing activities.

Expertise and experience:
University of Pitesti has a well-trained staff, is working with a large range of experts in education and in other various fields, being able to develop and provide a solid expertise. We can mention here:

  • initial training of the future teachers;
  • compulsory perfecting/perfectioning of the teaching staff in the view of obtaining the title of "definitive teacher" and the didactic grades (I and II);
  • training courses at demand, re-conversion courses and other special training;
  • didactic evaluation and assessment;
  • international projects (pilot, mobility, network projects, etc. under Tempus, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci and other community programs);
  • open and distance courses;
  • practical stages in enterprises and other socio-economic organizations;
  • publishing of scientific works and books, literature, articles, leaflets, posters, other types of typified documents, etc.
University of Pitesti participated and it is still involved actually into a series of transnational cooperation projects (ongoing projects under Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates, Jean Monnet and other programs), in its quality of promoter/coordinator or partner (see www.die.ro)

Specific tasks in this project: in accordance to the work plan established and agreed by the partnership (see work plan) University of Pitesti will be involved in all main activities of the project, meaning:

  • selecting and organizing a repertoire of appropriate computer-based robotic activities and producing a set of critical examples that can be used in a constructivist way by teachers at secondary school level in the areas of science and technology
  • developing and implementing training courses for teachers choosing appropriate activities and strategies designed to help and encourage them to adopt these new pedagogical methods
  • evaluating the courses and reporting experiences from the implementation of the courses in Romania;
  • creating a community of practice between educators and teachers for a continuous and sustainable professional development in using computer-based robotic tools through the integration of e-learning tools and supporting the development of a repository web site to make all the developed materials easily accessible for teachers and trainers.
  • disseminating the results of the project to the broader educational community

Role within the national education system: University of Pitesti is involved in the publicly recognized initial and/or in-service training of teachers or other categories of educational staff, through its specialized Department for Teacher Staff Training. This department manages the training of the teaching staff at the level of the whole Arges county (upgrade courses in the view of obtaining the didactic grades and periodically compulsory perfecting of the teachers).

IT+R :IT+Robotics srl -Private company (SER)
http://www.it-robotics.eu
Vicenza Italy

Alberto Pretto - CEO
alberto.pretto@it-robotics.it
 

Type of institution: IT+Robotics is a Spin-off company, founded on May 2004, and participated by the University of Padua. IT+Robotics is active in the filed of robotics, with particular regards to new advanced mobile robot platforms and omnidirectional vision systems. One of its interests is the use of wheeled robot platforms and humanoid robot platforms for educational purposes.
IT+Robotics has acquired a large competence in using this kind of robotic technologies exploiting the research activities of the Laboratory for Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-Lab), directed by prof. Enrico Pagello at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua.
IT+Robotics plans to develop new robotics products and to enhance robotics products acquired from other countries (especially from Japan and Korea), by adding embedded systems and by developing software tools, in order to improve the value of the imported products.

Expertise and experience: IT+Robotics has a significant competence in organizing national and international events to promote the field of robotics both as a learning tool for pupils and students and as a new emerging technology. Some examples of past organized events are the events and the demonstrations organized at SMAU (the largest Italian fair of Information and Communication Technology) in October 2005, and the activities organized in cooperation with the Museo Civico of Rovereto, and the organization of RoboCup-2003 Symposium & Competition in Padua - Italy in 2003 by part of the staff of IT+Robotics.
IT+Robotics is actively collaborating with international partners like the University of Osaka (Japan), the University of Lecce (Italy), the Politecnico of Milan (Italy). Other collaborations are at a preliminary stage, like the one with the AIS Fraunhofer Institute (Germany).

Contribution to the project : IT+Robotics will collaborate in the shared tasks planned in the outputs and workplan of the project and will contribute to:

  • The design of didactics robotics experiences and the production of manuals and documentation suitable to support the teachers class activity
  • the implementation of software tools designed to enable teachers and students of secondary schools to use and to program robotic platforms
  • the organization and management of workshops or demonstrations of edutainment robots related to the project.

Role within the national education system: IT+Robotics is an official spin-off of the University of Padua.

MCdR: Town Museum of Rovereto -OTH
Department: Physics and robotics
www.museocivico.rovereto.tn.it

STEFANO MONFALCON - Educational coordinator for Physics and robotics
smon70@libero.it
 

Type of institution: The Town Museum of Rovereto www.museocivico.rovereto.tn.it is located in Rovereto, Italy. It is a public institution. The Museum comprises the following Departments: Department of Archaeology, Department of Fine Arts, Department of Natural Sciences. The newest departments are those of Astronomy and Robortics (New Technologies). The Museum has a very active Educational Department. Every year about 10.000 students attend its classes and laboratories, indoor and outdoor.

Expertise: The Town Museum of Rovereto offers educational activities aimed at primary and secondary schools in all the fields of natural sciences, archaeology, robotics and new technologies. The lab of the Town Museum of Rovereto implements courses for teachers on new technologies, in order to make teachers aware by their own personal experience of the potentiality of robotic technology as learning tool. Trainees use educational robots and software LEGO (The town Museum is the point of reference of LEGO for region Trentino Alto Adige), but also robots and software implemented by the museum's researchers. 'Guido' is the museum's robot, reacting at visual, audio and heat stimula.
The lab of the Town Museum of Rovereto has participated in the Festival of Science - Genua 2005, with activities and educational experiences in the fields of robotics and natural sciences aimed at teachers and pupils (14.000 trainees in 10 days). The activities were carried out with robots created with Lego components (The Lego Mindstorms system) and software LEGO (Robolab) but also with robots and software implemented by the museum's researchers.br/> The Town Museum organises every year a Science Festival, Discovery on film, with programmes, meetings, experiments and competitions on robotics and new technologies.

The Town Museum of Rovereto is publicly recognised as Teacher Training Centre. Among its aims, is to spread the scientific culture and to encourage teachers to adopt new pedagogical methods in their school curricula using new technology and the so-called 'laboratori del fare' (learning by doing). That's why the museum's educational coordinators have created the so-called 'Gruppo Scienze on-line', a group of teachers particularly interested in developing computer-based teaching methods in the fields of applied sciences, robotics and new technologies.

Contribution to the project: The contribution of the Town Museum of Rovereto to this project will be to collaborating in all the shared tasks planned in the outputs and workplan of the project and especially to testing the proposed methods with teachers' group, sharing and discussing information and results and disseminating them with papers and through our websites. The Town Museum of Rovereto will also become the location for a teacher training course aimed at teachers coming from all Italian regions, to test and experiment the use of computer-based robotic tools in educational activities. Beside its educational laboratory, the Museum has a conference room equipped for video-conference. Therefore It could host a sort of "Italian Conference" where to show and share experiences and educational activities in the framework of this project.

Role within the national education system: Beyond offering a series of educational activities and laboratories aimed at primary and secondary schools, the Town Museum of Rovereto is publicly recognised as Teacher Training Centre.

CUNI:Charles University Prague
Faculty of Education
http:// it.pedf.cuni.cz

Associate Professor Borivoj Brdicka -Department of Information Technology
bobr@mbox.cenet.cz
 

Type of Institution: EDU 4 - University with several Research Institutes
Main areas: pre-service and in-service teacher education, research on education, Specific: innovation in education, ICT Supported Collaborative Work, distance education
Types of activity: Teacher education, Educational Research and Development, Project Management, Consultancy, other services for teachers
Size of Institution: about 600 fte total; 15 fte for the department; 2 fte involved in this project

Expertise: teacher ICT education, Web based services for teachers, distance education, national coordination of international ICT-based educational networks (ESP, Comenius Network ECOLE), research in field of ICT-integration in education, participation in preparation of the official Czech Action Plan for Implementation of ICT in Education.

Experience in cooperation: Extensive, in many networks, and cooperation between academic institutions, both national and international.

Experience in Socrates projects: participation in many different projects during last 10 years, especially in Tempus, Minerva, Leonardo, Comenius. Particularly Comenius 2 project TRANSPRO and PROMISE was dedicated to teacher preparation for project methods connected with ICT. Good relationship with National Socrates Agency and Czech Ministry of Education. Involvement in evaluation of Czech Comenius 1 proposals. National coordination of SITES M2 research. Seven case studies published on the official Czech SITES M2 site - http://it.pedf.cuni.cz/sitesm2/. Coordination of the next SITES M3 module has been approved in coordination with the Czech Institute for Informatics in Education.

Specific project tasks: Coordination of project activities in Czech Republic, development of learning materials, training of teachers, publishing results and dissemination, assist with evaluation activities

UPNA: Public University of Navarre
http://www.unavarra.es
Departments: Psychology and Pedagogy/Computer Science & Maths engineering

Javier Arlegui - Member of teaching staff at the Teachers Training School arleguip@unavarra.es Alfredo Pina - Member of teaching staff at the Teachers Training School and at Engineers School.  

Type of institution: Navarre, which is a geographically and historically well-defined territory, emerges in the North of the Iberian Peninsula, bordering France. In the southern part of Pamplona, the capital of Navarra, rises the Arrosadia Campus of the Public University of Navarre. There are slightly over 700 teachers in the University and over 10.500 students, among them there are over 600 students in teacher training studies.
The academic activity in the Public University of Navarre is articulated around two faculties, two technical schools of higher education and a school of higher education: The Faculty of Economic Science and Business Administration, Technical School for Agricultural Engineering, Technical School for Industrial Engineering and Telecommunications, The School of Health Sciences and The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, that awards a degree in Sociology and Law as well as a diploma in Work Relations, Social Work and Primary Teaching which has various specialisations: Primary Education, Pre-school Education, Foreign Languages and Music Education.
The department is the organising unit for the development of the research and teaching activity of the subject areas. There are about twenty departments in the Public University of Navarre. Among them, related with our proposal’s subject, we have the Philology and Language Didactics Departmentwhich include the subject area of Language and Literature Didactics; the Psychology and Pedagogy Department which include the subject area of Didactics of Experimental Sciences and the Mathematics and Computer Science Department which include the subject area of Computer Systems and Languages.

Expertise: The subject area of Experimental Sciences Didactics (whose coordinator is one of the members included in this project team) is responsible of an Experimental Sciences Didactics Laboratory, and teaches on a Science and Technology Didactics course in our Primary Teacher Training Diploma, focusing on Learning by Enquiry methodology and on the Praxeology Organisation Theory (Yves Chevallard, IUFM de Marseille) that emphasises the importance of meaningful construction of textual science knowledge from active commonsense experience. It stresses the notions of a first laboratory: that of an Empirical Laboratory, for the acquisition and representation of experience and a second laboratory: the Computational Laboratory, for the modelization of the data obtained in the former. In both laboratory situations the methodology approach promotes a constructive process shared by all pupils in the classroom who progress throughout situations of active involvement, formalisation, validation and institutionalisation. At first, the scientific and technological models are construed (knowledge as object- knowledge), secondly, these models are put to use in the resolution of problems (knowledge as functional-knowledge) and thirdly, proceeds the stage of meta-study of these models exploring their limits and modifying them to apply to new problems areas.
Additionally, there is a course on Didactics of Logo Modelization, that consists of elaborating micro-worlds constructively (as S. Papert) relative to simple physical-technical phenomena. The course also proposes a methodological approach to teaching Logo Language, where the construction of Logo-procedures as technical knowledge that represents - the knowledge to solve - for a type of problem-situations. Special attention is paid to the constructive process through which the most simple action procedures are integrated into more complex procedures of a nominalising nature (textual aspects that are the study aim of another member in the project)
Considering the subject area of Computer Systems and Languages and within the technological range there are two aspects of the Spanish partner relevant to the project proposal and that can provide support in many aspects.
The first is relative to the experience of the group with Lego Robots for education. The origin of this project is the interest in developing a system, adapted to new technologies, that allows every user to learn a robotics programming language (LeJOS) to be used in an educational environment with LEGO Technology. The users can choose among different programming levels with attached information about the robotics and programming language used; learn from examples; design, compile and download to the robot the programs the users want; finally, the user can execute the code and view the results onto the robot through the web cam. The proposed system allows students to exercise and practice remotely and effectively anywhere and anytime they want. More information can be found at http://www.iadat.org/iadat-e2005/Abstracts_WEB/IADAT-e2005_5.pdf (Second IADAT International Conference on Education, Biarritz (FRANCE) from July 7th to 9th, 2005). The second is relative to the experience in E-learning for different educational activities and the cooperation in national and international projects. More details on this are given below.

Experience in co-operation at local, regional, national and trans-national level: The Spanish team has been involved with science and technology teaching methodology for teacher training at different levels: Locally, the team has collaborated with schools in Navarre in an in-service teacher-training programme on computer-assisted learning for science teaching (interactive physics). At national level, and for various years, an inter-university collaboration with the University of Zaragoza exists for the teaching of doctoral courses on the Didactics of Modelization and for joint research projects on Diagnostic Study of the Teaching of Science by Enquiry.
At international level, the team has taken part in an European Lingua A project on Mainstream Bilingual Education in Science (TEL2L project ). In order to promote a greater coherence between individual initiatives and a greater partnership between EU countries, the Tel2l Project was designed. By bringing together practising MBE teachers on the one hand and teacher training institutions on the other, it aims to train student teachers to operate in an MBE setting whilst responding to the increasing demand of MBE-specific classroom material. With a fully trained and practised cohort of teachers, MBE is finally coming to a stage when it is accepted, highly valued and, it is hoped, proves to be a useful tool for integration and better understanding of European languages and cultures whilst preserving national and regional identities.
This year a joint project with the Catholic University of Chile has been accepted for the Development of Computer-assisted Technology Teaching Units for School Laboratories.
In the subject area of E-Learning and Multimedia and Graphics Learning, the Spanish team has collaborated for four years with different European and Latin-American partners in two European Alfa projects, T-game and T-gameL3 that has enabled the realisation of a solid and effective transatlantic net. The creation of this net intends to demonstrate the responsibility of cooperation in the field of institutional management establishing a programme of actions focused on the aspect of Service Management of University Extension, that is, the services of universities directed to the general public emphasising the activity within the field of continuous training, using new technologies (Internet) and the methodology approaches related with either on-line learning or distance learning. The offer is adapted to the idiosyncrasy of each country and academic context.
It is also worth mentioning that the Spanish team participates in the Shared Virtual Campus of the group G9 (CVC-G9) where on-line teaching is provided and other types of cooperation is carried out (Videoconferences, cooperative technological activities, etc.).

Specific tasks in the project: The Spanish team will collaborate in all the shared tasks planned in the outputs of the project (section 3), including

  • work on the design of Robot experiments with LEGO
  • implementation of a Teacher Education final course at University of Navarra, as it will be developed by ASPETE and the other partners , months 18-20. design of the virtual platform that will provide support for the partners of the project and future users of the project outcome.