Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

ALLS participated in the 27th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2019) last December 2-6, 2019, held at the Howard Beach Resort, Kenting, Taiwan. The Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) organizes this annual conference to provide a venue for teachers, students, and researchers to interact and share their research work in computers in education. This year’s conference theme was “Intelligent Computing and Convergent Education”, which highlights the emergence of technological capabilities to support smart education and learning.

Pre-conference events (Early Career Workshop (ECW), Doctoral Student Consortium (DSC), workshops, and tutorials) were conducted on the first two (2) days. The main conference comprised of keynote presentations, parallel paper presentation sessions, and poster presentations began on the third day.

ALLS participated in both the pre-conference and main conference events. The paper presentations are:

Pre-Conference

1. The Development of a Teacher’s Guide for English Proficiency Games by Monica Moreno, Dominique Marie Antoinette Manahan, Marika Gianina Fernandez, Jose Isidro Beraquit, Nicole Bugayong & Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo (workshop)

2. Development and Testing of a Mobile Game for English Proficiency Among Filipino Learners by Monica Moreno, Dominique Marie Antoinette Manahan, Marika Gianina Fernandez, Michelle Banawan, Jose Isidro Beraquit, Marie Rianne M. Caparros, Philip Caceres, Walfrido David Diy, Lean Rimes Sarcilla, Francesco Amante & Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo (workshop)

3. An Investigation of Affect within Ibigkas!: An Educational Game for English by Michelle P. Banawan, Raul Vincent W. Lumapas, Jaclyn L. Ocumpaugh, & Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo (workshop)

4. Exploring Common Code Reading Strategies in Debugging by Christine Lourrine Tablatin (ECW)

5. An Investigation of the Impact of Gamification on Novice Programmers’ Achievement and Learning Experience by Jenilyn L. Agapito (EWC)

6. Can “Stag-and-Hare Hunt” Behavior be Modeled using Interaction Data from a Mobile-Supported Collaborative Learning Application? by Rex Bringula & Ma. Mercedes Rodrigo (DSC)

Main Conference

1. Leveraging LSTM in the fine-grained analysis of the Incubation Effect in Physics Playground by May Marie P. Talandron-Felipe & Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo (Full Paper)

2. Drug Defense: A Mobile Game for Prevention of Alcohol Abuse by Divine-kia T. Tan, Rodrigo Emmanuel Roy, Jose Rafael Lasala, Anton Gabriel Yap, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Walfrido David Diy & Ma. Regina M. Hechanova (Short Paper)

3. Analysis of Student Affect and Behavior while Playing a Mobile Game for English Comprehension by Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Jenilyn L. Agapito & Dominique Marie Antoinette B. Manahan (Short Paper)

4. Designing Pre-test Questions as Phone Notifications: Studying the Effects of a Mobile Learning Intervention by Ingrid Yvonne Herras, Don Romielito N. Abanes, Nico B. Del Rosario & Jonathan DL. Casano (Short Paper)

5. Investigating Functional Fixedness among Novice Student Programmers by May Marie P. Talandron-felipe & Kent Levi A. Bonifacio (Poster)

6. The Role of Technology Identity among Students in Rural Areas using a Web-based Tutoring System by May Marie P. Talandron-felipe (Poster)

Two amazing recognitions during the final ceremony were received: Dr. Michelle P. Banawan was awarded Best Paper Reviewer and Dr. May Marie P. Talandron-Felipe won Best Overall Paper for her study “Leveraging LSTM in the fine-grained analysis of the Incubation Effect in Physics Playground”. Additionally, Rex Bringula was among the eight (8) Merit Scholarship Awardees.

ALLS would like to thank the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) for this opportunity and we look forward to participating again next year!

ALLS participated in The Philippine eLearning Society’s 4th International Congress on eLearning last September 12-14, 2019. The Philippine eLearning Society (PeLS) is the country’s leading organization in promoting and advancing eLearning in corporate, academic, government and non-profit institutions. This community serves as an avenue for sharing eLearning experiences and best practices among stakeholders, and promoting public awareness and appreciation of the nature and uses of eLearning.

Through the International Congress on eLearning (ICE), PeLS aims to actively promote eLearning among educators, school administrators, practitioners, and lifelong learners in the ASEAN region and beyond. With this year’s theme, “Empowering the future workforce in the era of disruption”, the congress focused on the discourse on preparing learners as the digital workforce of tomorrow. ALLS participated in the parallel presentations for this year’s ICE. The presentations include: Augmented Reality Applications for Museum Learning, Ibigkas! Mobile Game, and Learning Likha: Music for the Fiesta.

During the awarding ceremony, the Augmented Reality Applications for Museum Learning was awarded with the Best Paper Presentation award. The presenter, Kevin Arnel C. Mora, was then awarded with the Best Presenter award.

ALLS would like to thank The Philippine eLearning Society for this opportunity and we look forward to participating in more events to share further insights and discoveries in the near future.

Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo presented a summary of the paper entitled”Teacher Professional Development @ Scale: Review of Emerging Technologies to Address Personalization, Support, and Assessment” at the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB’s) 8th International Skills Forum held at the ADB from 27-29 August 2019.  The paper is currently still in draft form and is being co-written by Dr. Jenilyn Agapito, Dr. May Marie Talandron-Felipe, and Mr. Jonathan Casano.  The paper was commissioned by the TPD@Scale Coalition for the Global South (https://tpdatscalecoalition.org), of which ALLS is a member.
The paper should be released to the public within 2019.

The other speakers on stage were Kirsty Newman of ADB, Prof. Cher PingLim of the Education University of Hong Kong, and Justin Modesto of the Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development.

Neithan Casano attended this year’s Advanced Learning Theories, Technologies, Applications and Impacts meeting at The FedEx Institute of Technology in the University of Memphis where he presented the mobile applications that were created from the MAGIS and JOLLY grants of ALLS.

In this meeting, professors and students coming from four member universities (University of Memphis, University of Graz, National Taichung University and Central China Normal University), as well as invited industry partners (inq-ITS and SquirrelAI) gathered to exchanged ideas on the direction and creative implementations of Adaptive Instructional Systems (AIS) and various methods of computer-aided learning.

A full version of the presentation may be found in the public ALLS facebook page and a few notes regarding what has transpired during the ALTTAI meeting may be found here.

Neithan was also invited by Dr. Frank Andrasik to present the MAGIS and JOLLY apps to the faculty and graduate students of the department of Psychology of the University of Memphis.

Neithan Casano and Dr. Didith Rodrigo presented a poster entitled Card-Collection Mechanics in Educational Location-Based AR Games: Transforming Learning Goals to Virtual Rewards and a paper entitled Ibigkas! 2.0: Directions for the Design of an Adaptive Mobile-Assisted Language Learning App in the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction held at the Disney Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida.

A full version of the Ibigkas presentation can be found in the public ALLS page via this link.

Chinese participants viewing the posters were using Baidu’s AR camera to translate the posters into Mandarin (hcii 3).

Neithan met with Dr. Ryan Baker and Dr. Jaclyn Ocumpaugh to discuss research and academic life. Neithan presented the MAGIS and JOLLY apps to the members of Dr. Ryan’s Educational Data Mining laboratory. Dr. Jaclyn is co-author in the Ibigkas! project and Dr. Ryan is currently working on early prediction of at-risk students in new school districts in the United States.

Neithan met with Dr. Neil Heffernan in the Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he was shown the latest version of Assistments. Assistments is a free education tool that teachers may use to monitor student progress and concept mastery. The technology is currently used by over a thousand teachers in 42 states in the USA and in 14 countries. Currently, they are conducting 10-year tracer studies to determine if students who have used Assistments when they attended high school ended up working in STEM-related fields.

Neithan also met with Francis Castro and Dr. Ivon Arroyo at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Francis is currently working on learning models for novice programming courses under the mentorship of Dr. Kathi Fisler. Dr. Ivon is continuing their work on Embodied Cognition (EC) Learning Frameworks. Just recently they have deployed a multi-language version of their EC games for Mathematics and are currently testing its acceptance and effectivity in Argentina.

June 10-11, 2019, Arete, Ateneo de Manila University

The ALLS Summer School was led by Dr. Xiangen Hu, professor at the University of Memphis and Dean of Psychology at the Central China Normal University. He conducted a two-day workshop on conversation-based intelligent tutoring systems as well as a public lecture on Advanced learning theories, technologies, applications, and impacts using an adaptive instructional system (AIS).

Full details here.