Development of Software for Educational
Activities
Leo Burd
MS Dissertation Defense
DCA-FEE, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
October, 1999
Reference materials
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Final dissertation document (in Portuguese): PDF version (6 Mb)
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Video of a presentation based on the defense (in English): click
here
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Slides of the presentation (in English): PDF
version (0.5 Mb), MS
PowerPoint version (1.3 Mb)
Abstract
This work
is centered on the idea that no given software or technology, by itself, is
able to educate a person. If we believe that education is the result of a set
of activities that create favorable conditions for learning and teaching,
then computational systems will be more or less “educational” depending on
the kind of support that they offer to these activities.
In other
words, educational software should not be analyzed or developed without
considering the educational activity where it is going to be used. A text
editor used by a group of students in the creation of the school newsletter
will probably have a different educational result from the one achieved by
the same students when they use the same editor to copy parts of books.
The
challenge is how to describe educational activities in such a way that, on the
one hand, would allow software engineers to understand what has to be done
and, on the other hand, would consider the ideas and needs of educators. This
is the major goal of the present work.
To deal
with this problem, an approach to software development is proposed based on
Activity Theory, a theory that studies how culture, social interactions,
tools and other elements affect the development of human activities.
Recently, Activity Theory has gained broader attention in the field of
Software Engineering, mainly in the consideration of human factors.
As a domain
of application and reference for the proposed approach, we focused on Constructionism, a theory that studies the use of
technology in the creation of educational environments. The most well known
pragmatic result of Constructionism is the Logo
programming language which, for the past 20 years, has been used by millions
of students as a fertile soil for the development of critical reasoning and
the construction of mathematical concepts.
Based on
the analysis of constructionist education, the development of an activity
using the Cocoa software is discussed in full detail. Results indicate that
the proposed approach models relevant characteristics of the educational
context and allows the identification of several aspects to be considered in
the analysis and development of new software for education.
Thesis
Supervisor: Prof. José Armando Valente
Dissertation committee
Prof. Dr. José Armando Valente (Supervisor)
Núcleo de Informática Aplicada à Educação - UNICAMP
Profa. Dra. Beatriz Mascia Daltrini (Co-supervisor)
Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação - UNICAMP
Prof. Dr. Ivan Luiz Marques Ricarte
Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação - UNICAMP
Profa. Dra. Afira Vianna Ripper
Faculdade de Educação - UNICAMP
Profa. Dra. Heloísa Veira da Rocha
Instituto de Computação – UNICAMP
Bibliographic reference
Burd, L. (1999). Desenvolvimento de Software para Atividades
Educacionais [Development of software for
educational activities]. State University of Campinas, Brazil.
MS: 241 leaves.
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