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School LABoratory anticipating FUTURE needs of European Youth

Deliverables

The learning scenarios for the History Experiment in Greece have been developed in line with the user criteria and use cases provided by the Pedagogical experts committee of the project. These scenarios aim at: - enabling students at a remote site (e.g. Benaki Museum) to study the real exhibits in comparison with their virtual representations available on a website (Experiment Specific Server). - enabling students to become active learners by giving them the chance to direct their learning process - prompting students to find out ambiguities and contradictions about the exhibits.The learning scenarios are supported by educational content authored in close collaboration with teachers teaching history at the second grade of a Greek secondary school. The content refers to the following historic periods: - Proto-Byzantine Period (300 a.c. - 717 a.c.) - Meso-Byzantine Period (717 a.c. - 1025 a.c.) - Hystero-Byzantine Period (1025 a.c. - 1461 a.c.) The educational material is available as a series of HTML pages (including text, images and other assorted types of files that could be attached to a posted message) uploaded to the Experiment Specific Server (ESS).
The XML Exchange Protocol is used to communicate and to control Experiment Specific Servers (ESS) from an UI. It provides a structured and easy-to-use access to resources of the ESS. By the use of such protocol the user interface can be decoupled from experiment servers. This makes it easy to add or reconfigure ESS configurations without changing the GUI.
The deriveSERVER offers a web-based solution for dynamic, remote experiments with simulation over real and virtual components. Several users can work together using either a virtual front-end only and/or having real objects on a "Mechatronics Modelling Table".The web service is running standalone or can be controlled using the XML Exchange protocol from other applications such as e-Learning environments. It is used in LAB@FUTURE for Fluid Dynamics experiments and is directly integrated into the PLATINE environment using the exchange protocol. It also exports it's content to the PG Multi-User ServerFeatures: - Web-Service - Multiple users and multiple experiments at the same time - Implementation of the XML-Exchange Protocol - Simulation over real and virtual objects - Tight coupling of real and virtual components
Lake pollution play is a computer game where the user explores the processes in a freshwater lake, which regulate the level of oxygen and possibly harmful substances in water. The game appears in virtual reality and can be performed in single user as well as in the multi-user mode. The user navigates in virtual reality world as a pilot of a "spaceship" which represented in the form of an animal, since we are dealing with the living system. The aim of the game is that the user enters the virtual world and needs to survive there. In order to survive he needs energy which he can get from the factory, which in turn pollutes the lake? Too high a pollution of the lake results in the loss of the health of the user, what is visualized in the increased degree of transparency of his sprites and is also shown on the screens of his monitors. So just living with no concern means to get ill because of the increasing pollution. The way of survival is to use your knowledge to help to clean the lake. A simple example how to try to survive is to let the cleaning plant work, but this also costs your resources and is too expensive for your health. You need to know that water plants help cleaning the lake and so you fire the missiles in order to plant them. If you plant them on the right location, you get bonus survival points and the lake gets cleaner.
One of the key objectives of teaching Fluid Dynamics in vocational education is to enable students to learn something about Fluid Mechanics and its relation to practice. A set of experiments where developed for teaching Mechatronics using the LAB@FUTURE Platform with our deriveSERVER. Features: - Oscillating Cylinder - Industrial Safety Circuit - Modular Production System
The PLATINE environment, developed at LAAS-CNRS, is a software platform used to support remote collaboration among users organized in sessions. The current PLATINE version is devoted to asynchronous and synchronous sessions. In the asynchronous phase, the registered users are authorized to access independently (i.e. without any synchronization among them) the platform. During the synchronous phase of a session, the users are aware of each other, and may use different synchronous collaboration and communication tools to work together and implement a collaborative task (as pedagogical scenario). Tools implemented belong to three categories: - administrative support tools for session definition, management and visualization - asynchronous tools for communications between asynchronous phase of a session - synchronous tools for communications between synchronous phase of a session Three main collaboration and communication services available during a synchronous session are: - Informal communication among users through audio video-conferencing (in a multicast setting) and chat - Document sharing through whiteboard - Management of single-user applications through application sharing The PLATINE environment is used by the LAB@FUTURE platform for communications within sessions. During the synchronous phase of a session, users communicate in an informal way, share documents and applications, and access remotely to the pedagogical experiments based on virtual reality technology.
TUV had a one-week test run with two selected high school groups, who regularly visited our lab and worked with the system under the guidance of a teacher and our technical support. Tests were run in two computer labs located on two different floors. The function of the first and main laboratory was to accommodate the immersive Construct3D set-up, where 2 students collaboratively solved a task. The students wore Head-Mounted Displays and used 2 tracked Personal Interaction Panels and tracked pens to interact with the system. A teacher kept monitoring the students’ progress on a control screen appearing on a BARCO table. The control screen contained the same virtual scene as that of the students but featured a video background rendering a live video stream of a tracked observer camera that the teacher could position arbitrarily. Since the tracking system knew the exact location and orientation of the camera, the virtual objects including the objects of the mathematical problem and the interaction devices were aligned with the real world and rendered correctly. The students and the teacher were all wearing headsets consisting of headphones and a microphone so that they could communicate with the students sitting in the other laboratory serving as observers and advisors. These students did not have a teacher, just received technical help from technicians, so they worked independently and under no guidance. They received the mathematical problem that the students working with the immersive set-up in the 1st lab had to solve, so they could provide active help using voice chat with the audio-conferencing module and collaboratively drawn notes with the shared whiteboard module. The 2nd lab also featured a control screen appearing on another BARCO table. This BARCO table showed exactly the same images as the 1st BARCO control screen in the 1st lab. The live video background was transmitted using a videoconferencing module built into the Studierstube collaborative AR framework, while the virtual objects were rendered locally exploiting tracking data sent by the tracking server, thus resulting in much clearer images compared to a solution transmitting video stream containing the already composite images. During the geometry experiment the general platform communication and collaboration tools were well exploited besides the active use of the ESS machines.
Four scenarios were created within the LAB@FUTURE framework to test, assess and evaluate the performance and usability of the Construct3D collaborative augmented reality application for geometry education and the performance of the general collaboration tools: - Classic scenario: A mathematical problem is chosen in accordance with the cooperating partner schools matching the curriculum of the descriptive geometry subject being taught in their classes and in accordance with the research project and evaluation interests. The mathematical theory of the problem is explained by the teacher and discussed with the students prior to the LAB@FUTURE experiment. Having covered the theoretical background in class the students come to our laboratory to try theory in practice using our pre-installed laboratory. A teacher, groups of students and an instructor are present. - Mobile scenario: This scenario differs from the classic scenario by using a mobile augmented reality that can be taken to an actual classroom, therefore there is not bound to a university laboratory. -·Mobile scenario with projection screen: This scenario adds a large projection screen to the mobile scenario so that an arbitrary number of observer students can be added to the learner group. -·Desktop-based: This scenario uses a desktop-based augmented reality system enabling an inexpensive though with some limitations coming from the lack of an immersive environment.
The History Experiment aims at: enhancing traditional approaches and contexts of teaching and learning History by connecting formal and informal settings using ICT-energizing mobile eLearning techniques for implementing educational walks, visits and seminars. To carry out the experiment students need to have at their disposal equipment, which varies depending on the place the students are located, as follows: the remote site (e.g. museum): - Tablet PCs and PDAs connected to Internet - Access points, to provide access to the Internet through a WLAN -GSM/GPRS cell-phones to take photos of the exhibits and send them to the Tablet PCs/PDAs through Infrared technology and, thereafter, to a predefined e-mail address (through a publishing mechanism the photos are published at the History Experiment Specific Server). -Digital cameras to take photos/videos of the exhibits. At classroom - 14 workstations with Internet connection At an observing school - Workstations with Internet connection. Through the Tablet and Desktop PCs, students are able to access the History Experiment Specific Server, the LAB@FUTURE Generic Communication and Collaboration Server (GCCS) plus the 3D-chat. All students are able to communicate and exchange messages with each other through the GCCS tools.
The multi-user server (MUS) within the LAB@FUTURE platform is the module responsible to synchronize the 3D content of experiments among multiple users. In general, MUS acts as the transmitter that gets notifications from clients (about actions they perform in a 3D world) and retransmits this information to the rest of the clients. The appropriate 3D/VRML content for the MUS has been also developed to serve as the informal communication channel and the front-end to the 3D-powered experiments. 3D content is re-distributable in VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) format, which is the open source language and an ISO standard
The evaluation methodology provides an approach to perform theory-based evaluation, taking into account several levels of evaluation (starting from traditional usability studies, learning processes and outcome all the way up to organisational evaluation). A procedure for the derivation of theory based evaluation criteria has been developed and for each evaluation a number of qualitative as well as quantitative data collection instruments have been developed.
Guidance for the development of learning tasks and the design of courses with respect to the underlying pedagogical framework, identifying the key characteristics for social constructivism and expansive learning. The guidelines contained in this result were followed during the development of the Lab@Future scenarios and plans.
The HyperBond Tool realizes a tight coupling between physical and virtual phenomena. HyperBonds are bridging the gap between reality and virtuality by transmitting physical phenomena (air pressure, electric potential) from one side to the other and vice versa. They follow the theory of Bond Graphs, which provides a unified view on different systems using the notion of effort and flow.

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