Fantastic news!
UbiLife Lab was awarded a three-year project (7/2015 – 6/2018) grant by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea. The project is titled Learner-Aware Adaptation Framework for Programming Education (LAAF-PE), and it aims at facilitating the development of learner-aware programming education games for primary school students. Here is an excerpt from the project proposal that summarizes the project:
Korean government is introducing programming education to school children. Most of programming education materials are based on textbooks, and have no personalization to match the learner context (e.g., skill level, learning style, preferences, attention, emotions). Furthermore, textbook-based education can be demotivating to children. In this project, we will create a Learner-Aware Adaptation Framework for Programming Education (LAAF-PE) and demonstrate its feasibility with educational games that aim to teach programming at elementary and middle school levels. The key point of LAAF-PE is that it transforms physiological data (e.g., eye movement, heart rate) into high-level meanings (e.g., attention, emotions), and then combines them with the learner profile (e.g., learning style, previous knowledge) to build an ontology-based learner context model. Based on the model, the framework can personalize learning content for games aimed at programming education. The framework also supports gesture-based technologies to promote hands-on learning experiences. The ultimate goal of LAAF-PE is to deliver personalized learning content in a motivating way.
This project will definitely be a major undertaking for UbiLife’s members, but we are confident that during the next three years we can demonstrate some really amazing research outcomes!