Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

The 19th Philippine Computing Science Congress (PCSC 2019), held last March 2019 is organized by the Computing Society of the Philippines. This conference aims to enable local and neighboring computing educators, researchers, ICT professionals and students to interact and to share their work in computing, computer science, computer engineering, computational science, and information and communications technology (ICT). The conference features special lectures by prominent researchers and educators in the field of information and communications technology (including computing, computer science, computer engineering, computational science, and related disciplines). It also features contributed research papers on computing and ICT.

Maureen Villamor and Dr. Didith Rodrigo received the Best Paper Award [PDF] and Research Award [PDF] for their paper, Analyzing Gaze Patterns of Individuals in Programming Pairs [PDF]. Congratulations to the authors!

Congratulations to the two ALLS groups who won the 2019 SOSE Interlinks People’s Choice award!

(1) Developing a Virtual Reality Psychological Horror Video Game to Raise Awareness on the Nature of Schizophrenia
Carlos Joaquin B. Alcantara, Kurt Sigmund A. de Leon, Joaquin Paolo C. Jacinto, Walfrido David A. Diy

(2) Simulating Flood-related Disaster Scenarios Using an Augmented Reality Sandbox
Faine Mabry A. Fonseca, Raphael S. Remorosa, Aaron Cole T. See, Paolo Antonio G. Gonzalez, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Ph.D

Dr. Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo presented the paper entitled “Exploring Active Learning for Student Behavior Classification,” co-written by Cristina E. Dumdumaya and Yancy Vance M. Paredes, at the 2019 7th International Conference on Information and Education Technology. The conference was held from March 29 to 30, 2019 at the University of
Aizu in Aizuwakamatsu City, Japan.

On Saturday, February 2, 2019, over 200 public school teachers attended the workshop entitled, “Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension” hosted by the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ACED) and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development (ACED).

In the morning, Ms. Anne Shiela Choi of the College of Education of UP Diliman gave a talk entitled, “Using Think Alouds to Develop Reading Comprehension.”  She was followed by Ms. Erika Jenny M. Rocena who gave her talk entitled, “Communicative Language Teaching Strategies.”

In the afternoon, a team from ALLS led by Dr. Didith Rodrigo, Marika Fernandez, and Dominique Manahan introduced participants to Ibigkas!, a drill-and-practice game for phonemic awareness, synonyms, and antonyms.  Ibigkas! comes as a mobile phone app and a deck of cards. Participants were able to download the app and were given copies of the cards for them to use in their classes.

The slides of Ms. Choi are downloadable here.  Ibigkas! is available free of charge from the Google Play Store and the App Store.  The printable version of the Ibigkas! card sets can be downloadable from the ALLS website.

On March 4-8, 2019, Michelle Banawan attended the 9th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference in Tempe, Arizona. LAK gathers esteemed researchers and experts in the field of Learning Analytics like Dragan Gasevic, Ryan Baker, Ken Koedinger, Ulrich Hoppe and a lot more.  This year’s LAK was hosted by the Arizona State University.  Michelle presented her paper entitled “An Investigation of Academic Performance, Mindless Reading and its Indicators” in one of the pre-conference workshops, i.e. Predicting Performance Based on the Analysis of Reading Behavior: A Data Challenge. The PDF version of the paper is published in LAK’s companion proceedings and in the workshop website : https://sites.google.com/view/lak19datachallenge

She also met and discussed grouping experiments, deployment of affective studies and other publication outputs for the JOLLY project for both Ibigkas ang Learning Likha with Dr. Jaclyn Ocumpaugh of the University of Pennsylvania. She would like to acknowledge the Commission on Higher Education, the JOLLY research grant and the Ateneo de Davao University for the funding support.