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In the course of digitization, the transfer of digital skills is becoming increasingly important. Children and adolescents also come into contact with digital media more and more often. In the area of early childhood education (kindergarten) special attention must be given to a critical-reflective approach, so that children know the limits of digital media and develop the ability to control their media consumption. Educational applications could help children acquire these skills.
One problem is that early childhood educators often lack the technical skills to independently develop digital applications. Although there are modern tools that provide programming beginners with graphical programming an introduction to software development. These tools hardly go beyond the pure learning approach. It would therefore be interesting to develop a video game editor that is suitable for early childhood education.
For this reason, this paper deals with the development of a prototypical web tool for game development in the field of early childhood education.
As part of a human-centered design process, the goal was to achieve a good user experience for the target group of early childhood educators.
Therefore, a group discussion was organized early with students of childhood education in order to identify their needs and to gather ideas for the functionality of the application.
Based on the requirements and a discussion of alternatives, a new game engine was designed and implemented. A special feature of the Game Engine is the concept of graphical programming, in which symbols are combined in a simple if-then system to produce dynamic behavior. In addition, the naming of concepts and elements largely dispensed with technically sound terms.
As part of a final focus group test with students of childhood education a good user experience for the temporal dimension before use (anticipated period) was determined. The basic concepts of the application were well understood. Only four out of 31 participants did not dare to use the application at the end of the test. In addition, an online survey was used to evaluate the user experience for the period after use. Students were able to try the game engine at home for this purpose. Here, a mixed user experience and improvement potential of the application was found.
This paper describes the concept of the Erasmus+-project “Modernisation of Master Curriculum in ICT for Enhancing Student Employability in Belarus” (MaCICT) as well as its implementation plan. MaCICT is aimed to enhance the employability of ICT master students, foster entrepreneurship and establishment of SMEs in the ICT sector, and to upscale the position of higher education in the sector on the market. To achieve these goals, we plan to undertake the following activities. First, before the curricula can be modernized, the main weaknesses of ICT employees and ICT university graduates need to be identified. Bearing in mind that:
1) Belarus has a strong tradition of providing competitive education in ICT and
2) the Belarusian ICT industry is export-oriented offering various services for foreign clients, the weaknesses may predominantly be found in missing communicative skills, including foreign language skills and skills of intercultural communication, operative management skills, and in the missing spirit of entrepreneurship.
The motivation to undertake activities related to the project results from the following reasons. The ICT sector is an essential element in Belarus’ economy and the ICT development is defined as a priority task in the National Strategy of Sustainable Economic Development of Belarus up to 2030. Due to its strong ICT education and cost-competitive salaries, the Belarusian ICT industry is export-oriented. During the Soviet time, the ICT industry of USSR was concentrated in Belarus. The ICT tradition from those days has been kept upright - today's ICT industry in Belarus offers various types of ICT services for foreign clients. Although the growth of ICT services has been fast (more sevenfold from 2005 to 2015) and has reached more than 15 % of total export in 2017, the full potential has not been reached yet. To increase the ICT sector’s position as a central soil for the Belarusian economy, factors that hinder further growth, need to be identified and improved. Two of such factors are the inefficient dialogue between the ICT sector and higher education and a rather passive role of universities in framing trends on the market.
The novelty of our study is the new attempt of the MaCICT to respond to these challenges. We will apply the novel didactic method T-CHAT that can help to enhance the mentioned skills and to modernize the existing ICT curriculum needs. We will concentrate on an interdisciplinary study programme at the master level, to equip graduates with competitive skills and competencies requested by the regional, national, and global market to optimize their employability. By doing so, we consider university as an education service provider and an active participant of the market rather than a knowledge-generating authority only. Consequently, the study programmes need to become more labor market and society oriented, practice-based, and student-centered. The market orientation forces universities to combine the traditional professional skills and competencies with soft and transferable skills. Additionally, the universities need to focus more on multidisciplinary studies and internationalization of the study environment.
In this paper, the actor-oriented Java framework Actor4j is used to implement administration shells in a RAMI4.0 context to enable the implementation of hybrid cloud solutions. A novel architecture is conceptualized around the usage of the Actor Model, especially in the area of edge and cloud computing. The administration shell can be either implemented by an asset that is OPC-UA ready or be mapped to a gateway in the device (service) cloud. The administration shell implemented with the Actor Model (predominantly for the public and private cloud) consists of four modules: the components module (describing the corresponding system), the publish-subscribe module, the additional logic module (conditions, alarms), and the interaction module (behavior). The main idea is to reuse an OPC-UA compliant implementation for the internal actor logic. At the device cloud level, IT/OT entities can be composed together in a domain specific point of view. This is implemented over three abstractions levels (data acquisition, data analytics and control & monitoring). The proposed Actor Model fits very well for the implementation of large scale administrations shells.
Implementing an Energy Management System in a Learning Factory – A Project-Based Learning Approach
(2020)
Education in Industry 4.0 is becoming an essential and challenging task for engineering curricula. The current engineering curricula need to be upgraded with new and innovative learning methods to meet competency requirements set by the industry. The paper proposes a project-based learning (PBL) approach to provide a learning experience that enables the development of Industry 4.0 competencies for different industrial problem statements. The presented PBL approach uses a learning factory developed at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer and is demonstrated through a case of adding an energy management system to the Industry 4.0 learning factory.