Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

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.

ALLS participated in The Computing Society of the Philippines’s 2nd Information and Computing Education Conference (ICE 2019) last October 3-5, 2019. The Special Interest Group in Information and Computing Education of CSP (CSP-SpICE) in cooperation with the Computer Studies cluster of the Ateneo de Davao University organized this three (3) day conference to provide a relevant platform for information and computing professionals, teachers, graduate school and undergraduate students, and researchers alike to interact and share their expertise and research work in computing, computer science, computer engineering, computational science, information science, information technology and computing education. The event also featured special lectures from prominent researchers and educators in the ICT field as well as peer-reviewed research papers on computing and ICT. The aforementioned special lectures were presented by ALLS alumni, namely Michelle Banawan, Cristina Dumdumaya, May Marie Talandron-Felipe, and Maureen Villamor.

The ALLS’ papers were all nominated for Best Paper for this year’s conference and all presenters were featured during the Plenary Session. The papers featured are as follows:

1. A Method for Automatically Estimating Areas of Interest Boundaries for Text Areas by Ezekiel Adriel Lagmay and Ma. Mercedes Rodrigo

2. Exploring the Relationship between Self-efficacy and In-game  Behavior within Crystal Island by Arnel Ocay and Ma. Mercedes Rodrigo

3. Development and Testing of a Mobile Game for Arithmetic Using a Reusable Framework of Mobile-Based Drills by Ma. Mercedes Rodrigo, Dominique Marie Manahan, Johanna Marion Torres, Kevin Arnel Mora, Jose Isidro Beraquit and Jenilyn Agapito

After much deliberation, Ezekiel Adriel Lagmay and Ma. Mercedes Rodrigo’s paper entitled A Method for Automatically Estimating Areas of Interest Boundaries for Text Areas was awarded as the Best Paper for this year’s Information and Computing Education Conference.

ALLS would like to thank The Special Interest Group in Information and Computing Education of CSP (CSP-SpICE) for this event and we hope to produce more relevant research papers in order to contribute to this community.

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.