LAB OF TOMORROW project:
A constractivist approach in
science teaching through the
emerging technologies
Dr. Sofoklis A. Sotiriou
Ellinogermaniki Agogi
Stockholm, June 2001
The Lab of Tomorrow project
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The framework
The consortium
Project’s Description
Human centered design
Pedagogical and Technological innovations
Examples
“To improve the quality and accessibility
of learning at primary and secondary
school level through embedded IST, in
particular addressing knowledge and
skills required by future citizens of the
Information Society”
Main Objective of the School of
Tomorrow Action Line
The Lab of Tomorrow
Consortium
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ICCS / NTUA, Coordinator, Greece
STARLAB, Belgium
UNIV. OF BIRMINGHAM, United Kingdom
COREP, Italy
ANCO SA, Greece
UNIV. OF DORTMUND, Germany
ELLINOGERMANIKI AGOGI SA, Greece
4 EUROPEAN HIGH SCHOOLS, Germany,
Austria, Italy
Project’s Objectives
– The development of a pedagogical framework that will
allow successful application of the emerging technology
in everyday learning
– enhancement of a constructivist approach in science
teaching
– development of new educational tools and learning
environments
– equal and parallel development of pedagogical and
technological innovations
– development of a concrete evaluation scheme of
educational and technological aspects
Project’s description
• “Lab of tomorrow” project proposes the introduction of
an innovation into everyday teaching.
• Wearable computers and intelligent sensors will be used
to guide students through the learning process in science.
• Fundamental physical laws in engineering and physics
can be addressed through the daily analysis of the data
that will be collected by some intelligent artefacts.
• Students will be able to graphically view all quantities
under study and the data correlation through a scatter
diagram on a computer screen.
• The project will attempt to overcome the limits of
the classroom by having a network of schools
gathering the same type of data and comparing
their measurements.
• Research will thus become a collective process
and the evaluation of the methods proposed will
offer new innovating teaching techniques to be
applied in the future educational environment.
The implementation scheme for the Lab of
Tomorrow project.
PEDAGOGICAL
PATHWAY
Development of
the prototypes
Test Run
Validation and
redesign
Final Run –
phase A
Final Run –
phase B
TECHNOLOGICAL
PATHWAY
First meeting
Second meeting
(Technological and
(Assessment of the Test Run)
Pedagogical design)
Teachers’ workshop
Toys, wearables
(Presentation of the prototypes)
available
Students’ projects
Closing conference
(Presentation of the results)
Human Centered Design in the
Lab of Tomorrow project
Would you identify the basic steps of a
human-centered development process?
Human-centered product development starts by studying
the users for whom the device is intended, in the field where
they normally work, study, and play.
Do what I call "rapid ethnography."
Then, using rapid prototyping procedures, design, mockup,
and test -in hours or days - to find out how people respond to
the product idea. Repeat this process until you settle upon an
acceptable result (this whole cycle is actually quite fast).
Then write the manual - make it short and simple - as simple
as possible. Use the manual and the prototypes as the design
specs for the engineers.
D. Norman
Human centered design in the
Lab of Tomorrow
• Make rough, crude
prototypes
• Show them to sample
users in real situations
• Refine the early ideas
and testing
• Start building when
users are “happy”
• Development of axion
prototypes
• Teachers’ meeting/Teachers’
workshop
• Three cycles of school
centered work
• Development of wearables
and toys
Contextual design (Incontext
Enterprises)
Student-centred development
• The cycles of school-centred work are not only meant
for evaluation purposes (technological and pedagogical).
• The aim is to help both teachers and students reach
beyond “clichιs” to the areas in which they can make the
most valuable contributions, and potentially increase
their role on the world stage afterwards.
• To assure maximal usability of the new tools, optimal
adaptation to the local environments and realistic
evaluation of the pedagogical effects, the developed
software use a heavily student-centred approach.
The six disciplines of User Experience
(Norman, The Invisible Computer)
• Field studies
• Behavioral designers
• Model builders and rapid
prototypers
• User-testers
• Graphical and industrial
designers
• Technical writers
• UniDo - EA
• StarLab - UoB
• NTUA - StarLab -UoB
• Schools
• COREP - ANCO
• NTUA - UoB
Innovation
• Pedagogical Innovation
• Teaching Science through every day activities
• Reinforcing inter-discipline approaches
• Promoting behavior and process oriented learning
• Technological Innovation
• Bridging the gap between pedagogy and front-end
technology
– Activity based design methodology
– development of a series of lesson-plans
Technological innovation
• The consortium plans to develop a family of tiny,
fully programmable computational devices, the
axions, that can be embedded in everyday objects
and cloths.
• The axions will give data in a format compatible
with graphing and analysis software components,
so that students can easily investigate trends and
patterns in the data they collect with the wearable
sensors
Equal and parallel development of
pedagogical and technological
innovations
• In the presented approach technological innovations
were designed to serve clear and specific educational
demands.
• During the development of the proposed tools
students and teachers came together with researchers,
psychologists, and technological and educational
experts to contribute to the re-engineering of the
school of tomorrow and test and evaluate the new
ideas, concepts and technologies in real school
environments.
Technological development
• The project encompasses three significant technologies
• intelligent clothing and wearable sensors
• advanced real time communication systems
• data manipulation, analysis and integration
• axions (sensor interface, main board-microcontroller,
communication system)
• two categories of artefacts will be developed: toys and
wearables
Axions
• accelerometer and Local GPS (basic laws of mechanics,
Newton Laws)
• Recording of the Heart Electrical Signals (ECG)
• a sensor based on piezoelectric phenomenon to measure
the distance covered
• A Thermometer sensor (temperature, basic principals of
Thermodynamic Laws)
• Sensors, microphones, to record the acoustic signals
(analysis of wave phenomena)
The block diagram of the axion which
includes the sensor interface, the main board
and the communication module
Smart shoes (by Steve Mann, MIT
Media Lab)
Compass and local GPS in a ball
Distribution of load
Kick life into the classroom
• The axions will provide data in a format compatible
with graphing and analysis software components, so
that students can easily investigate trends and
patterns in the data they collect with the wearable
sensors
• “Kick life into the classroom”: the graphical userinterface will plot the data on a graph, will create a
mathematical model to fit the data and relate the
graph with the motions of axions. As an example the
case of a football game is presented.
Kick life into the classroom
Lab of Tomorrow
www.laboftomorrow.org
The project is being carried out in the framework
of the IST programme of the European
Commission