Education |

Facilitating Discoverability of Educational Resources in Schools in Scotland

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This project is about investigating the needs and challenges of primary and secondary school teachers in Scotland involved in finding, using, and sharing educational resources online. The first exploratory stage involves interviews with primary and secondary school teachers, teacher trainees, and other school staff to define the processes involved and how these processes are situated in teachers’ work context. The second stage will be a review of existing tools that facilitate these tasks. Thirdly, iterative design and prototype evaluation studies will be carried out to experiment with potential improvements to online resource discoverability. This project is largely building on the previous work .

Practical approaches to freeing university material stockpiles

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Open Educational Resources bring lots of benefits, but how can we implement them in practice? There is no 1 tool that ticks all the boxes for everyone, but we have produced several documents to help HE staff make decisions about what to use in their context.

I presented findings from our recent project “Set Them Free! Open Publishing of INF1B Course Materials” at the Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference. In the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics case, we have begun development of an open courseware site using Drupal, which is now available at .

Altra Past Paper Explorer

Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This was a project where we banded together with several University of Edinburgh students to create an EdTech start-up. Our aim was to create software to help Scottish school teachers save time. Through initial consultations and co-design with teacher volunteers from Facebook groups, we settled on a project idea – Past Paper Explorer.

In Scotland, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) manage standardised exams for all schools at National 5, Higher, and Advanced Higher level. Past exam papers are made available publicly in PDF format. Teachers use past papers to create revision exercises for their pupils. However, searching for keywords or topics or types of questions through individual PDFs is difficult.

We parsed and indexed the content of past papers in several subjects (initially history, social studies, life sciences, maths, physics). This allowed users to easily find questions by subject, topic, year, or keyword. Each question was also linked to the relevant marking scheme that the SQA also publish.

Building on this, we also started development on the Resource Builder – another app for creating worksheets from past paper questions, allowing you to reuse and modify questions. Unfortunately, due to other commitments and plans, we ceased work on the Altra Past Paper Explorer and Resource Builder.

It may yet still be revived sometime in the future.

Mock-up screenshots and links (to access Invision FreeHand board links, click “log in as guest” in the top right corner and enter any email address):

Fill in the World: gamification in children's online language learning

Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This project was about the design, implementation, and evaluation of “Fill In The World” – a gamified language learning application for primary school children. The game allows children to learn English vocabulary through creative and collaborative exploration, unlike any of the explored existing applications. Following usability evaluation, it was established that the game still needs to be improved and extended before it could be implemented in classrooms or used for research about the effectiveness of individual gamification elements.

Fill In The World is featured in the .

Figma mock-up screenshots: