Edtech and Design Lab Project Selected at International Conference

By Bruna Cronfli and Matheus Alves

Edtech and Design Lab professors, Maria Eduarda Menezes and William Cavalcante, are authors of the article “Student’s Agency and Protagonism in a Transdisciplinary Project”, which was selected to be presented at the “XII International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Education ”, in Braga, Portugal. 

The conference will be held by the Institute of Education of the University of Minho, the first to address the subject of Digital Communication Technologies in Education in Portugal. The conference will happen from September 10 to 17.

The article reports the experience gained by the 4th-grade class (Y4) of 2019, where students had the opportunity to study the instruments used to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, speed, wind direction, and rainfall. Afterward, they researched ways to build these meteorological instruments by hand, which could be finally assembled during Design Lab classes.

The experience was part of the Unit of Inquiry  “What’s the Weather Like?”, which has global warming as a central theme. During EdTech classes, students created websites to spread information, in partnership with Science, English and Portuguese teachers, who offered support for the content production and its revision. Besides information about global warming, the students decided to include videos on the website about the creation and operation of the instruments produced.

The objective of the experience was to reveal how students have the potential to actively research and produce content, being protagonists of their own learning.

We are proud of the work done by students and educators, and also of the article that was selected for a conference, whose genesis to relate academic research with pedagogical practice in schools.