Vânia Carlos
Researcher at University of Aveiro (Department of Education and Psychology / CIDTFF) “Smart Educational Communities: geographic citizen science networks connecting smart open cities and schools in the Aveiro region”.
PhD in Multimedia in Education (2015), Masters in GIS (2005) and Degree in Geography (2000).
Research interests: smart cities and schools learning, spatial literacy, citizen science, volunteered geographic information, educational data mining, spatial data visualization.
Professional expertise in GIS and in urban spatial planning. https://about.me/vaniacarlos
PhD in Multimedia in Education (2015), Masters in GIS (2005) and Degree in Geography (2000).
Research interests: smart cities and schools learning, spatial literacy, citizen science, volunteered geographic information, educational data mining, spatial data visualization.
Professional expertise in GIS and in urban spatial planning. https://about.me/vaniacarlos
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The emergence of ESD has heightened the need for pedagogical techniques that promote higher-order thinking skills (Hopkins and McKeown, 2001), being critical and spatial thinking, all interconnected prerequisites for Sustainable Development (UNECE 2009).
This paper discusses the role of geospatial technologies in developing both critical thinking and significant learning for sustainable development, through spatial thinking. Focus group interviews with research specialists were analysed within the theoretical framework of taxonomies of Spatial Thinking, Critical Thinking and Significant Learning, to identify students´ Critical and Spatial Thinking skills and to develop an instrument to assess those skills in the context of fieldwork.
This paper draws requirements for educational mobile geogames from school curricula and reviews existing games. We propose a new game “OriGami” that accounts for these requirements. We implement a prototype of the game with different orientation and map reading tasks and conduct a study to explore how these tasks influence the performances of individuals: Participants have to follow a route on a map guided by verbal (egocentric, allocentric, or landmark-based) instructions. The task is intended to foster orientation competence with maps. The results showed that different instructions influenced the performance, while spatial abilities did not. Results suggest that egocentric route instructions involving corrections of misalignment decreases accuracy compared to the other instruction types. Therefore, OriGami could be used to train individual’s competence for such corrections. Finally, we outline the complete concept of the game.