ENABLE

Educational Advancement of ICT- based spatial Literacy in Europe

Short Description

ENAbLE is a 3 year EU Erasmus+ project starting September 2014, in which GEOTEC cooperates with the University of Munster (Germany) and the University of Aveiro (Portugal) to improve ICT and spatial literacy skills in secondary schools. The ENAble team sets out to develop a toolbox of mobile educative apps to teach secondary school students relevant spatial skills. GEOTEC focuses on the development of an indoor navigation app, using gamification and collaboration techniques to engage students, and teaching them skills such as wayfinding, spatial orientation, map reading, among others. The different apps will be integrated in current curricula, and accompanied with teacher resources so they are immediately deployable in class. To ensure the viability and applicability of the developed solutions, the scientific partners closely work together with several secondary schools, teachers’ education centers, government representatives and ESRI as an industrial technology providers, all of which form part of the strategic partnership set up for ENAble.

GEOTEC’s contribution

Within the ENAble project, GEOTEC is responsible for the development of a mobile game called NavApps. In the spirit of ENAble, NavApps is a geogame that aims to improve spatial literacy in secondary school students. It particularly focuses on reinforcing and improving spatial orientation, map interpretation and spatial reasoning. The game is a treasure hunting app that consists of 4 phases: school mapping, school exploration, treasure planting and treasure hunting. During the first phase, students and teachers map the different buildings, floors and rooms that will participate in the game in a dedicated web applications, by drawing them on a digital map using basic shapes. In the second phase, students explore the buildings by physically moving to a certain specified location, and indicating their arrival in the mobile game. Behind the scenes, the mobile app collects relevant data (i.e., WIFI fingerprints) to enable our proprietary indoor-positioning system, which is use during the next two phases. In the third phase, the students get the opportunity to hide an amount of treasures in the school, and describe and indicate them on the map. Finally, in the last phase, students search for treasures based on textual and spatial cues. Throughout the game, different wayfinding techniques (map-based, directions-based, proximity-based, etc.) and spatial assignments train the students’ spatial skills. Finally, to entice students to play the game, and continue playing it, NavApps uses gamification elements: a scoring system, rankings, collaboration and competition among players, etc.

Publications

Frías-Garrido, David; Monfort-Muriach, Aida; Casteleyn, Sven

NavApps: A mobile game to improve spatial literacy for secondary school children Inproceedings

In: INTED2017 Proceedings: 11th International Technology, Education and Development Conference, pp. 5774-5779, IATED, Valencia, SPAIN, 2017, ISSN: 2340-1079.

Links | BibTeX

Frías-Garrido, David; Casteleyn, Sven; Monfort-Muriach, Aida

NavApps: Un juego móvil para mejorar las habilidades espaciales en la ESO Conference

Conferencia Esri España 2016, 2016.

Abstract | BibTeX

Casteleyn, Sven; Frías-Garrido, David; Huerta-Guijarro, Joaquín

NavApps: A Mobile Game to Improve Spatial Literacy in Secondary School Inproceedings

In: ESRI User Conference: San Diego 28-28 June 2016. Session: Let's Play! Gamification in GIS Education and Spatial Literacy, 2016.

Abstract | BibTeX

IP: Joaquín Huerta (huerta@uji.es)
Technical contact: Sven Casteleyn (sven.casteleyn@uji.es)